Shades of Resonance: Fond Reminiscence - Memory Log #9

Jumpman and Jumpman Junior

"Now wait a minute!" you say with great surprise. "Nintendo made Mario games for the Commodore 64!?"

Well, no, actually. The Jumpman games are not in any way related to Mario's. They exist within their own universe.

"So, then, why the hell do their heroes carry his original name?" you ask while leaning toward the screen with a confused look on your face.

Well, you see, reader: Around the same time Nintendo's provisionally named Jumpman was still barrel-hopping in arcades, the game company Epyx was busy giving life to a character of the same name on the Commodore 64 and other other computer platforms like the Atari 800 and the Apple II. And this springy little fellow was the star of Jumpman, a 1983 arcade-like platformer.

Really, because I was young and stupid, I didn't even know that Donkey Kong's protagonist ever went by the name of "Jumpman"--that there was ever a time in which he wasn't called "Mario"--so I never had a chance to be confused over the matter. To me, the only "Jumpman" in existence was the gangly fellow who starred in that wacky Commodore 64 game to which I was always inexplicably returning.

Well, actually, there were two such games: The original Jumpman and its visually identical sequel, Jumpman Junior, which starred Jumpman's indistinguishably rendered son. Both were rather-simple arcade-like platformers in the vein of Nintendo's early arcade games, though, contrarily, they lacked any of said games' polish or sense of restraint. Their action, for example, moved so blazingly-fast that it would inevitably get out of control and become unmanageable; and their controls were so sticky and shaky that they made the simple acts of jumping from platform to platform and climbing ropes and ladders into absolute nerve-racking adventures. How the heroes would react to such inputs would sometimes be a total mystery; sometimes they'd just stand there idly, as if no command was ever input, and other times they'd clip off to the side and get stuck in a platform.

The normal rules of video games didn't apply to the Jumpman games, it seemed. To them, things like "level design" and "game mechanics" were up for interpretation. That much was clear to me anytime I'd seemingly miss a jump but instead become lodged in the target platform and subsequently, somehow, boosted up to said platform. I wasn't sure if this "platform-boosting" was an intended mechanic or if the game was inventing its rules on the fly (usually I felt as though I was cheating whenever I utilized it).

And yet, despite their feeling like complete messes, I never perceived them to be broken games, and I actually found their "style" of gameplay to be appealing even though it was sometimes unfathomable to me and I couldn't survive its madness for very long (also, I might have been mentally deficient).

"Surviving madness" was an apt description of their gameplay. That's how I saw it. And, for some reason, I really liked it.

In contrast, its objective was easy to understand: You complete a stage by collecting all of its unidentifiable, strewn-about pellets. That was it. Though, there was some complication therein. Sometimes the procuring of a pellet would cause environmental changes such as the sudden appearance or disappearance of a platform or ladder section. And other times--for "Why not?" reasons, I guess--the procuring of a pellet would immediately cause (a) a section of platform to drop on my head or (b) the floor to drop out from beneath me.

Unavoidable death. Because "Why not?"

Though, really, the environmental-change mechanic added some variety to the gameplay because it allowed for the creation of puzzle-type stages. In these stages, you had to identify which pellets were event-triggering and grab them in a specific order, and your failing to do so would result in certain pellets being permanently inaccessible. Still, these puzzles were nothing that couldn't be solved with a little memorization.

The only challenge, of course, was getting the heroes to execute the intended movements. That, you could imagine, was a whole different story.

Some stages had enemies, and they were usually weird (the games' enemy casts were eclectic mixes of ground-crawling critters, aliens, vampire bats, UFOs, robot ducks, hyperactive dragons, speedy Jumpman clones, and other weirdly random foes). And the most recurrent of their type, inexplicably, were these annoying bullets that would float in from random locations and then dart at you when you moved within their line of sight. Whenever I was playing one of these games, I'd always be fearful of these obnoxiously stupid bullet "enemies" because of their propensity to suddenly appear right at one of the screen's edges while I was currently standing near it and thus kill me instantly. There was no way to predict when this would happen, and, when it did, it was already too late to react!

"What the hell were they thinking with this?" I'd always wonder in the moments after I was taken out an edge-spawning bullet.

Or were they thinking about it?

I'm not sure.

For me, death was the theme of the Jumpman games. When I'd play them, all I'd do was die in every conceivable way. It didn't help that theirs were the most fragile heroes in the history of games. They were a lot like early-years Mario in that they couldn't survive a fall of more than a few inches, which was a huge problem in games whose platforming challenges provided you little to no margin of error. If the platform to which you were jumping was as much as two pixels lower than the one from which you jumped, it was over; you'd break your legs and fall to your death. Falling and dying--that's pretty much what I spent the entirety of my Jumpman play-throughs doing.

I might have been infuriated by all of the stupid deaths had I not gotten a kick out of the games' shared death animation, which saw the hero tumble down several stories and pinball off of every platform he hit during the drop, with each flip, flop and crash being emphasized by an appropriately comical sound effect. Then after he splatted to the ground, the death would be punctuated by wacky sped-up version of Chopin's Funeral March.

So these games were punishing, certainly, but they were also very funny. That's a big part of the reason why I kept returning to them. If I couldn't competently complete their stages, then at least I could enjoy their silly sights and sounds. That's how I felt about Commodore 64 games in general; they had such a unique style of humor to them--one that I found very appealing. And the Jumpman games were a pure expression of that spirit.

Jumpman Junior was, like I said, more or less identical to Jumpman, though it at least gave you an option to choose between 8 different gameplay speeds and thus speeds whose action was actually controllable. And it did provide some new content--some new stage hazards like fire beds, shifting ladders, moving walls, falling stones and partial lightlessness. So it wasn't a complete copy-and-paste job, no.

Though, of course, it still contained the same gameplay formula and the same sloppy, punishing platforming mechanics. Also, unfortunately, it had an overload of those irritating floating bullets (including, most frighteningly, those that now waved across the screen), whose presence guaranteed that I'd never advance too far into the game. And what was worse was that none of its changes--even those that seemed positive--did anything to mask the game engine's glaring flaws.

Even during a time in life when I couldn't tell you what made for a "true sequel," I was pretty certain that what Jumpman Junior was presenting wasn't a good template for such a thing. I mean, it was basically just Jumpman with a different name!

"Is it really a 'sequel' if it's practically the same game?" I'd always wonder. "And if it doesn't do anything truly new, then does it need to exist?"

Jumpman Junior was less "expansion-pack material" and more a pure replication of the original work. And that, I thought, was such an odd thing for a purported "sequel" to be.

"Then tell me this, video game boy," you say while holding that same confused look. "If these games were as flawed as you say they were, then why in the world did you keep returning to them?!"

Well, I can give you two reasons: The first is that they were actually quite fun! I was hard on them because of the fact that their mechanics were unpolished, yeah, but still, like I said, I could always count on them to provide me that uniquely fun "surviving madness" style of action--platforming action that was wildly frenetic and thus silly in the most entertaining way (even when it was causing me to put the controller down in disbelief and wonder about the sanity of the people who designed these games). And because it was, I'd have a good time whether I was succeeding or failing. It wasn't like that with most other games.

The other reason was that Jumpman and Jumpman Junior were quintessential Commodore 64 games, which is to say that I saw them as strangely unorthodox and thus wildly fascinating. They were, to me, everything that Commodore 64 gaming was about: brazenly disregarding the established rules and going to places where no one else would dare to go. When I was playing Jumpman and Jumpman Junior, I was out in the wilderness--in a world unlike any other; and that they could take me to such a place was a big reason why I kept returning to them.

"This is our house!" they'd say. "And here we can break as many rules as we want!"

Because, really, why not?