It started with an ape...
Platform games are games where the player controls a character jumping or climbing from platform to platform, avoiding enemies and other life-threatening objects. Shooting does feature in some platform games, but the main focus is always on getting around obstacles in the level. Many platform games feature side-scrolling backgrounds; the player typically moves from the left side of a level to the right.
The first platform game ever is a nearly forgotten game called Space Panic, an arcade machine released in 1980. The genre really got popular when Nintendo released Donkey Kong in 1981.
Based on the movie King Kong, Donkey Kong featured a hero called Jumpman, trying to rescue his girlfriend Pauline from a giant ape called According to [WP] the game's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, actually intended the game to have this name. "The 'Kong' part is obvious, but the 'Donkey' part represents 'Stubborn'."Donkey Kong. The player controlled Jumpman as he climbed screens full of platforms, jumping over barrels and other building site debris thrown by Kong.
Jumpman was later named He was named after their unfriendly landlord, according to [CC]...Mario by the staff in Nintendo's American office. With this, one of the most famous characters in gaming was born. Wikipedia writes the following about Mario's appearance:
Mario's distinctive look is due to technology restrictions in the mid-'80s: with a limited number of pixels and colors, the programmers could not animate Mario's movement without making his arms "disappear" if his shirt was a solid color; they did not have the space to give him a mouth; and they could not animate hair, so Mario got overalls, a moustache, and a cap to bypass these problems.
After Donkey Kong became a success, Mario got his own series of games. Super Mario Bros. 3, released in 1990 became the best selling console game of its time, only recently surpassed by Pokémon.
The first platform game1 that featured side-scrolling was Pitfall (1982). Pitfall became the best known VCS game of all time. Another interesting feature of Pitfall was that the hero could swing on vines over pools of alligators.
Prince of Persia, created by Jordan Mechner in 1989, marked an important step forward in the quality of animation. The animations for the characters were created using a technique known as rotoscoping; they were based on actual films Mechner shot of his brother. Another game that marked an important advance in graphics was Donkey Kong Country (Rareware, 1994) for the SNES. This game was the first game for a home console system to use pre-rendered 3D graphics. Instead of drawing the characters and environments by hand, they were modelled in 3D software before being rendered and put into the game.
While mainly a console genre, platformers also became popular on the PC when id software released Commander Keen in 1990. id software later developped several famous shooter games.
When 3D graphics technology became available in the 90's (most noatbly the Playstation and Nintendo 64 consoles, platform games tried to make the jump to 3D. One of the first successful 3D platform games was Super Mario 64, which was released together with the Nintendo 64 in 1996. However, this was not the first platform game to use 3D graphics. The arcade game I, Robot, released in 1983, was the first videogame2,3,4 to use 3D filled polygons.
A common problem in 3D platform games is the In Super Mario 64, the camera is actually represented in the game by a floating character named Lakitu, who follows Mario around the game and can be seen in mirrors.camera; 3D platform games generally use a third-person perspective, either with a camera that follows the main character or with fixed camera positions. In almost all platform games this can create situations where the camera gets stuck or the player cannot see his character properly. Super Mario 64 tried to solve this problem by giving the player (limited) control over the camera in the form of three zoom levels, the closest of which meant looking through Mario's eyes.