Platformer

Lore & Background

The genre originated in the early 1980s. Space Panic (1980) is sometimes seen as the first platformer, though it lacks jumping. Donkey Kong (1981) allowed players to jump over obstacles and is widely considered the first platformer. It introduced Mario and inspired many clones, including Miner 2049er (1982) and Kangaroo (1982). Pitfall! (1982) expanded the play area with non-scrolling screens. Super Mario Bros. (1985) defined the genre with horizontally scrolling levels and a named character, Mario, who became Nintendo's mascot. The terms platform game and platformer became common by the late 1980s.

Platformers require maneuvering a character across platforms to reach a goal while avoiding enemies and obstacles. They are presented from a side view (2D) or in 3D with isometric or behind-character camera. Jumping is central, though exceptions exist such as Popeye and BurgerTime (both 1982). Games often include multiple levels of increasing difficulty, boss encounters, and collectible items. A modern variant is the endless runner, especially on mobile platforms.

Various names were used before 'platform game' became standard. Shigeru Miyamoto called Donkey Kong a 'running/jumping/climbing game' and later an 'athletic game.' Journalists used 'Donkey Kong-type,' 'Kong-style,' 'climbing games,' and 'ladder games.' In the late 1980s to 1990s, 'character action games' was used for games with named protagonists like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Reader's Guide

Platformers are significant as one of the foundational genres of video games, shaping the industry from the early 1980s onward. Donkey Kong (1981) established core mechanics—jumping over obstacles and climbing—that influenced countless titles. Super Mario Bros. (1985) set a standard for level design, character control, and scrolling gameplay, making Mario a global icon. The genre's popularity peaked in the late 1990s, with a 15% market share in 1998, but declined to 2% by 2006. Despite this, platformers remain influential, with modern variants like endless runners thriving on mobile platforms. The genre's emphasis on reflexes, timing, and dexterity has inspired game design across many other genres. Its legacy includes the naming conventions and gameplay templates that persist in action games today.

Did You Know?

• Space Panic (1980) is sometimes credited as the first platformer, but it does not include jumping.
• Donkey Kong (1981) was originally called a 'running/jumping/climbing game' by Shigeru Miyamoto.
• The terms platform game and platformer gained traction in the late 1980s, popularized by the United Kingdom press.
• By 2006, sales of platformers had declined to 2% of the market, down from 15% in 1998.

The Art of Vertical Movement

Platformers are defined not by where they take place or what story they tell, but by the fundamental way a player moves through space. At the heart of the genre lies a commitment to jumping and climbing as the primary means of navigation. Characters in these titles routinely leap many times their own body height, and the player retains meaningful control over their trajectory while airborne—dictating both how high and how far each jump carries them. The environments themselves are designed to reward this verticality: terrain is deliberately uneven and exaggerated in height, creating a constant interplay of leaping upward to new ledges and the risk of tumbling back down. Beyond pure traversal, platformers may introduce enemies and obstacles that must be fought or dodged, or they may strip the experience down to nothing but a sequence of spatial puzzles solved through precise jumping. As a subgenre of action games, platformers inherit an emphasis on hand-eye coordination, motor skill, and the kind of rapid, reflexive input often described as twitch gameplay.

From 'Climbing Game' to a Genre Name

When Donkey Kong hit arcades in 1981, it stood as one of the earliest and most recognizable examples of what would become a defining video game category. At the time, the American gaming press did not yet have a settled label for the style of play; instead, they referred to it as a "climbing game," a descriptor that captured the physical act of scaling obstacles but failed to name the broader design philosophy at work. The title nonetheless established the core template—jumping, climbing, navigating uneven terrain, and evading or confronting hazards—that future developers would refine and expand. Because most of the earliest video games were broadly categorized as action titles, Donkey Kong's platforming mechanics existed within that wider umbrella before the subgenre identity fully crystallized. Over the following years, the specific term "platform game" or "platformer" gained traction in the industry, distinguishing this vertical, jump-centric design space from other action subgenres like fighting games or shooters. The shift from a descriptive press label to a formal genre classification reflects how the medium matured and how players and developers alike began to recognize platforming as its own distinct craft.

A Genre That Sold the World

Super Mario Bros., released in 1985, remains one of the most commercially successful video games ever produced, with more than forty million copies sold worldwide. Its status as a platformer is not incidental to that achievement; the genre's emphasis on accessible, skill-based physical challenges—jumping, climbing, timing, and spatial reasoning—proved to be a universal language that transcended cultural and geographic boundaries. In the broader taxonomy of action games, platform games are consistently listed among the most recognizable and beloved subgenres, alongside fighting games and the shooter category that came to dominate sales from the 1990s onward. The fact that a title built almost entirely around the mechanics of leaping between platforms and navigating vertically exaggerated, uneven terrain could achieve such extraordinary commercial reach speaks to the genre's inherent appeal. It also underscores a key principle of video game classification: what makes a platformer is not its setting, its narrative, or the medium on which it runs, but the specific way the player's hands and eyes engage with the challenge of movement through space.

Where Platformers Sit in the Genre Map

Video game genres are organized not around story, setting, or the hardware a title runs on, but around the specific manner in which a player interacts with the game world. Under that principle, platform games occupy a clearly defined niche within the action category, which itself encompasses any title built around physical challenges demanding hand-eye coordination and motor skill. Action is a broad umbrella that branches into numerous subgenres—fighting games, shooter games, beat 'em ups, and platform games among them—each distinguished by its particular interaction model. Platformers, in turn, can be further described by whether they lean toward combat with enemies and obstacles or toward pure spatial puzzle-solving through jumping. Some titles, particularly in the browser and mobile gaming spaces, blur these boundaries and are classified under multiple genres simultaneously. This layered taxonomy—genre, subgenre, and sometimes overlapping categories—reflects the creative diversity within the medium while still giving players and developers a shared vocabulary for identifying what makes a platformer's jump-and-climb loop distinct from a fighter's combo system or a shooter's ranged engagement.