Donkey Kong was a major smash hit in video game history and it helped put Nintendo on the international entertainment industry map. It features a proto-Italian plumber dodging barrels and climbing up a single-screen tower of ladders and girders to defeat the giant gorilla Donkey Kong and rescue Pauline.
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| Donkey Kong |
In the years following, a fairly large number of "clones" appeared in arcades and on home systems and computers, trying to capture whatever it was that made Donkey Kong such a money making hit: Hard Hat Mack, Jumpman, Popeye, Ponpoko, BurgerTime and so on. None were exact clones, they all tried various gimmicks and reformulations, and many of them became classics in their own right, but none of them strayed too far from the single screen vertical up-and-down action -- in this Elevator Action isn't too different (except this time with scrolling).
Elevator Action takes a start-at-the-top-and-climb-down-to-win approach. You take on the role of a secret agent, secretly gaining access through a secure building's elevator shaft. As you work your way down the building via elevator, counter agents try to stop you from stealing secrets conveniently located behind clearly marked red doors. At the bottom of the building you hop in a getaway car and move on to the next level where the challenge gets cranked up a notch, repeat until you run out of lives.
The arcade Elevator Action isn't exactly a flashy game, even by 1983's standards, but it's competent. Ports were released for every system under the sun, but the Sega SG-1000 version interests me the most because of how spare the system resources were at the time. (Note: there was an Atari 2600 port under development, but it was never finished and the leaked game is not quite complete enough to be called a complete game).
Not even as powerful as a ColecoVision (and almost compatible with it), the SG-1000 was Sega's first entry into the home console market and came out a year after Coleco released their console and the same year Nintendo released their gaming colossus, the Famicom -- the SG-1000 never really stood a chance in the market. However, Sega kept trying, releasing a home computer version (that may have informed the legendary MSX standard), an SG-1000 II, then the Mark III, then the Master System and finally achieving global success with the Mega Drive/Genesis. Every one of those systems traces lineage back to the SG-1000.
So it's interesting to see what developers did, faced with the challenge of porting a complex arcade game to hardware so limited it couldn't even display two colors on a given sprite and could only show 16 colors at a time.
One of the things that set Elevator Action apart from other Donkey Kong clones was that Agent 17 ("Otto") is a surprisingly expressive character to control. He has lots of game verbs for a 1983 video game avatar. He can shoot his pistol, jump kick, control elevators, ride on top of them, shoot out lamps (rendering the game dark for a time), ride escalators, jump across elevator shafts, duck under enemy fire, enter red doors and probably a couple more things I can't remember. I'm hard pressed to think of another video game character that can do so many things until Super Mario Bros. redefined how characters should control 2 years later.
Elevator Action is also a violent game. You literally clear a skyscraper by going floor to floor and shooting everybody you see, regardless of any hostile behavior on their part. If you aren't shooting them in the face, you're kneeling and shooting them in the legs or crotch, dropping light fixtures on them, jump-kicking them or in rare circumstances crushing them with the elevators themselves -- turning conveyance into deadly weapon. Philosophically it may be that you are actually the bad guy in this game.
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| Elevator Action on the SG-1000 |
Distillation is the process of heating a liquid composed of several components in order to separate them. It's used in the production of petroleum products from crude oil and the production of hard liquor. And this is what the SG-1000 port of Elevator Action is, the distilled hard liquor of the original. It keeps just enough of the game there that you know you are playing the same game, while tossing everything else that's wasn't necessary. It's a remarkable piece of design editing. The graphics are just this side of representational, the signature theme song is intact, your jump arc is correct, even the height of your duck position is correct -- something that not every port got correct.
When compared to other ports on other limited systems, like the ZX Spectrum, it really shines. The Speccy port is a complete redesign of the game and it suffers from this, elevators move too fast, the character's signature duck (allowing enemy bullets to zip right over the classic hair style) is turned into a dive, the bullets move wrong, escalators are weird two part affair and so on. Everything important is here in the SG-1000 version.
There's only a couple places where maybe a little too much was edited out. The first is that your enemies are far more aggressive than the original (or other home ports), often firing the moment you can be hit. This amps up the difficulty so it feels more like the second or third level of the original. There's also a weird bug that sometimes prevents Otto from getting onto available elevators, sometimes putting you into poor tactical positions.
Still, these are minor issues with an otherwise great port of the arcade original. Despite being (or maybe because) such a violent game, I find it strangely soothing to play after a frustrating day at work. You jump in, shoot guys in the face or crush them under elevators, steal secrets and make your getaway. It seems really simple on the surface, but there's a strange depth to the gameplay that keeps it fresher and more interesting than you would think. The SG-1000 port distills this down to perfection and I find myself returning to this version of the game more than any other port -- even later easier versions with more gameplay options.
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