Fellas, if your game has platforming, comical traps, and a giant angry gorilla attacking you from above, that's not Donkey Kong, that's Crazy Climber!
The similarities are plain to see, yet there's a good reason why Miyamoto swapped out wall-climbing for jumping. Rarely does an arcade game use controls this unique and vexing, a great fit for gated joysticks and a horror with analog sticks. Crazy Climber asks you to learn an 8-way movement scheme and scramble up four increasingly challenging towers, with falling objects ready to knock you into the air like Hans Gruber. Imagine trying to learn how to walk all over again, frustrated in your attempts to reconcile how you think movement works with how it really does. This game might as well have pioneered the "difficulty wall" as a concept. It's just too damn happy to end your runs because of a split-second mishap, as was the case for me when trying to scale past closing windows or escape the Kong's punching range. Were it not for how unique and engaging it is just to learn the game's controls, I would have given up a long time ago. Surviving one round is a feat unto itself, and playing fast and efficient becomes a test of skill and endurance like little else at the time.
I'd ask what sick, twisted, and clever minds could engineer this monument of a 1980 arcade classic, but the development history's more complex than I expected. Basically, Nihon Bussan (aka Nichibutsu) had much less involvement in the creation of their earliest hits than the Western world thinks—almost all design, art, and coding work came from the often-forgotten Jorudan Co. [1] Both Crazy Climber and its older cousin Moon Cresta trace their concepts back to the late Mitsuo Honda, a planner working with Nichibutsu's home staff, plus freelancers Kiyoshi Oda and Toshikazu Sato at Jorudan, to bring new concepts into Japan's arcade market. Like other ambitious post-Space Invaders titles from the turn of the '80s, this one saw a rushed release, with concepts like clambering away from fires (a la The Towering Inferno) scrapped for time or avoiding bad press [2]. Whereas the publisher's space shooter innovated via a Voltron-like power-up system, Honda and co.'s second game practically reinvented the action game overnight. Only Space Panic was even toying with the idea of gravity-based threats and vertical progression by this point.
My enjoyment here came from narrowly dodging seemingly everything and the kitchen sink while I played human fly. You're able to straddle across and ascend up the windowsills not just in cardinal directions, but between two adjacent columns when positioning your arms just right. This all happens via a dual-stick control setup mimicking climbing motions, which takes up plenty of mental bandwidth before dealing with the towers themselves. All four stages vary in layout, alternating between wide and narrow columns sectioned by different kinds of traps. Sometimes it's burger-headed guys poking out and dropping plants, buckets, etc. on your head; one collision dislodges a hand, another send you falling! (And it's a life lost if you're in the middle of your climbing pose/animation, so staying put can be safer than risking a last-second escape plan.) Elsewhere, there's big 'ol birds crapping on you from a considerable height, or the aforementioned King Kong pastiche guarding the way to the roof. These earlier obstacles mainly affect one or two routes upward, but then there's malfunctioning signs spanning half the screen to get around. Yeah, it's a lot.
For creating what might as well have been the very first platformer, Jorudan struck gold. It's criminal that Honda, Oda, and Sato got paid a measly 8 million yen vs. the large revenues Nichibutsu's cabinets grossed [3]. Crazy Climber works because of its difficult controls, where finding a rhythm and consistently staying out of harm's way. The cute flourishes layered throughout, like the public domain song jingles announcing each stage, amount to something more than the sum of its parts. Maybe I'm just going easy on this one because it looks and sounds much better than almost anything from 1980. Blue sky background? Check. Crunchy sound design that would have made Namco proud? Absolutely. The game loop itself manages to find that one-more-turn addictive appeal despite its obtuseness. For example, obstacles that don't immediately drop you will still reduce the end-of-stage score bonus. Looking upward and juking enemies into wasting their shots on either side of you becomes a tantalizing activity for score-chasers. It's also just damn funny to watch my poor lil' guy get electrocuted while launching past an electrocuting banner, lighting up in the process. Just don’t dawdle for too long, though, or the game gets properly mean.
There's not much complexity to the average Crazy Climber—enough for a well-paced 1CC, not quite there for a repeat visit. It's a shame that the developers had to scrap four more levels, for which they'd built out new baddies and things to avoid, but had to scrap and move forward without or risk missing their deadline. Thrills come quick and linger around in this game, from the complications of getting anywhere up and around skyscrapers to the simple joys of finally grabbing that helicopter at the top. As unintuitive and hostile as it seems, I think it ends up becoming a fun, appropriately zany Harold Lloyd simulator (no suspended clock included). The score-run videos I've seen demonstrate the depths of player skill one can reach with this premise, to say nothing of the later sequels. That said, Crazy Climber is still a hard sell for anyone not into the more arcane depths of MAME set-up or who lacks one of the simplified console ports. I personally wouldn't settle for anything but the Famicom conversion since it adds content to compensate, but the home ports largely avoid the troubles I faced with rebinding sticks.
| Bibliography |
[1] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 前編.” Institute for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 9, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン1/.
[2] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 中編.” Institue for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 16, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン2/.
[3] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 後編.” Institute for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 19, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン3/.
The similarities are plain to see, yet there's a good reason why Miyamoto swapped out wall-climbing for jumping. Rarely does an arcade game use controls this unique and vexing, a great fit for gated joysticks and a horror with analog sticks. Crazy Climber asks you to learn an 8-way movement scheme and scramble up four increasingly challenging towers, with falling objects ready to knock you into the air like Hans Gruber. Imagine trying to learn how to walk all over again, frustrated in your attempts to reconcile how you think movement works with how it really does. This game might as well have pioneered the "difficulty wall" as a concept. It's just too damn happy to end your runs because of a split-second mishap, as was the case for me when trying to scale past closing windows or escape the Kong's punching range. Were it not for how unique and engaging it is just to learn the game's controls, I would have given up a long time ago. Surviving one round is a feat unto itself, and playing fast and efficient becomes a test of skill and endurance like little else at the time.
I'd ask what sick, twisted, and clever minds could engineer this monument of a 1980 arcade classic, but the development history's more complex than I expected. Basically, Nihon Bussan (aka Nichibutsu) had much less involvement in the creation of their earliest hits than the Western world thinks—almost all design, art, and coding work came from the often-forgotten Jorudan Co. [1] Both Crazy Climber and its older cousin Moon Cresta trace their concepts back to the late Mitsuo Honda, a planner working with Nichibutsu's home staff, plus freelancers Kiyoshi Oda and Toshikazu Sato at Jorudan, to bring new concepts into Japan's arcade market. Like other ambitious post-Space Invaders titles from the turn of the '80s, this one saw a rushed release, with concepts like clambering away from fires (a la The Towering Inferno) scrapped for time or avoiding bad press [2]. Whereas the publisher's space shooter innovated via a Voltron-like power-up system, Honda and co.'s second game practically reinvented the action game overnight. Only Space Panic was even toying with the idea of gravity-based threats and vertical progression by this point.
My enjoyment here came from narrowly dodging seemingly everything and the kitchen sink while I played human fly. You're able to straddle across and ascend up the windowsills not just in cardinal directions, but between two adjacent columns when positioning your arms just right. This all happens via a dual-stick control setup mimicking climbing motions, which takes up plenty of mental bandwidth before dealing with the towers themselves. All four stages vary in layout, alternating between wide and narrow columns sectioned by different kinds of traps. Sometimes it's burger-headed guys poking out and dropping plants, buckets, etc. on your head; one collision dislodges a hand, another send you falling! (And it's a life lost if you're in the middle of your climbing pose/animation, so staying put can be safer than risking a last-second escape plan.) Elsewhere, there's big 'ol birds crapping on you from a considerable height, or the aforementioned King Kong pastiche guarding the way to the roof. These earlier obstacles mainly affect one or two routes upward, but then there's malfunctioning signs spanning half the screen to get around. Yeah, it's a lot.
For creating what might as well have been the very first platformer, Jorudan struck gold. It's criminal that Honda, Oda, and Sato got paid a measly 8 million yen vs. the large revenues Nichibutsu's cabinets grossed [3]. Crazy Climber works because of its difficult controls, where finding a rhythm and consistently staying out of harm's way. The cute flourishes layered throughout, like the public domain song jingles announcing each stage, amount to something more than the sum of its parts. Maybe I'm just going easy on this one because it looks and sounds much better than almost anything from 1980. Blue sky background? Check. Crunchy sound design that would have made Namco proud? Absolutely. The game loop itself manages to find that one-more-turn addictive appeal despite its obtuseness. For example, obstacles that don't immediately drop you will still reduce the end-of-stage score bonus. Looking upward and juking enemies into wasting their shots on either side of you becomes a tantalizing activity for score-chasers. It's also just damn funny to watch my poor lil' guy get electrocuted while launching past an electrocuting banner, lighting up in the process. Just don’t dawdle for too long, though, or the game gets properly mean.
There's not much complexity to the average Crazy Climber—enough for a well-paced 1CC, not quite there for a repeat visit. It's a shame that the developers had to scrap four more levels, for which they'd built out new baddies and things to avoid, but had to scrap and move forward without or risk missing their deadline. Thrills come quick and linger around in this game, from the complications of getting anywhere up and around skyscrapers to the simple joys of finally grabbing that helicopter at the top. As unintuitive and hostile as it seems, I think it ends up becoming a fun, appropriately zany Harold Lloyd simulator (no suspended clock included). The score-run videos I've seen demonstrate the depths of player skill one can reach with this premise, to say nothing of the later sequels. That said, Crazy Climber is still a hard sell for anyone not into the more arcane depths of MAME set-up or who lacks one of the simplified console ports. I personally wouldn't settle for anything but the Famicom conversion since it adds content to compensate, but the home ports largely avoid the troubles I faced with rebinding sticks.
| Bibliography |
[1] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 前編.” Institute for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 9, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン1/.
[2] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 中編.” Institue for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 16, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン2/.
[3] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 後編.” Institute for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 19, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン3/.