Kangaroo

Kangaroo is an arcade platformer originally from the Japanese company Sun Electronics, released for the Atari 5200 by Atari under license shortly after the arcade original's success in arcades. The player controls a mother kangaroo climbing through several platform levels connected by ladders, collecting fruit and other bonus items while defending her kidnapped joey, held in a cage at the top of the screen, from monkeys constantly throwing apples and other objects down from every level. The kangaroo character can also throw punches at approaching monkeys directly on the platforms, giving the game a small extra action element beyond the pure jumping and climbing typical of other platformers of the era.

The Atari 5200 version preserved the basic structure of four recurring levels split across several game screens with gradually increasing difficulty and changing patterns of enemy movement and falling objects. The graphics are simple but clearly readable in color, with the silhouettes of the kangaroo and monkeys easily distinguishable against a single-colored background, and the music is limited to short jingles between levels, a perfectly standard solution for the time of release. Reviews and player reactions were moderately positive; Kangaroo never reached the fame of Donkey Kong, but was generally seen as a solid, honest alternative in the same genre with its own, if more modest, charm.

Today, Kangaroo is interesting mainly as a lesser-known piece of the puzzle of the early platformer era, showing how quickly the arcade market of the time could produce variations on successful formulas established by competitors, including direct inspiration from boxing and climbing. On the Atari 5200, it's a compact and decently playable game, better suited to short sessions between more demanding titles than to long, standalone play, but it still deserves a place in an overview of the genre's early console history.

Why play it: For short sessions between more demanding titles, and as evidence of how quickly the 1980s arcade market recycled successful formulas from the competition.