Kangaroo

Kangaroo is a 1983 Atari platformer, a port of a successful arcade cabinet from Japanese company Sun Electronics, in which the player controls a mother kangaroo trying to rescue her joey, kidnapped by a spiteful monkey. The joey waits at the top of a multi-story building, and the mother must fight her way through several floors full of falling apples, aggressive monkeys, and other hazards, aided by boxing gloves she can use to knock enemies straight in the face. Between floors are hidden bonus stages full of fruit, where the focus shifts to quick point-scoring rather than survival, giving the player a brief breather from the main dangers.

The gameplay combines jumping between floors, precise timing of punches, and collecting bonus items that gradually raise both score and difficulty. The Atari 2600 port had to contend with the console's limited graphics and color palette compared to the arcade original, yet it managed to preserve the core charm of the source material, including its recognizable characters and simple but inventive music accompanying the action. The controls are responsive, and the game emphasizes precise judgment of falling objects' trajectories, setting it apart from the slower platformers of the same era and giving it a snappier, more action-driven pace than was typical for home consoles at the time.

At the time of release, Kangaroo was among the popular arcade conversions on home consoles and benefited from the era's popularity of platformers alongside Donkey Kong. Today the game plays as a charming showcase of early platformer design, from a time when creators were still working out the genre's grammar - simple rules, a clear goal, and rising pace still make it playable for fans of video game history and Atari 2600 cartridge collectors, who also appreciate the unusual choice of a kangaroo heroine at a time when game protagonists were almost exclusively male.

Why play it: For fans of video game history and Atari 2600 cartridge collectors, it's a charming showcase of early platformer grammar, with the unusual bonus of a female hero in the lead role.