David Cranes Pitfall for the Atari 2600, with 256 horizontally connected screens, became one of the best-selling games on the system and was a breakthrough for the genre.

For platformer units in petroleum refining, see Catalytic reforming.

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Platformers are often characterized, but not defined, by their heavy use of jumping and climbing to navigate the players environment and reach their goal.

Levels and environments tend to feature uneven terrain and suspended platforms of varying height that requires use of the player character s abilities in order to traverse.

Other acrobatic maneuvers often factor into the gameplay as well, such as climbing, swinging from objects such as vines or grappling hooks, jumping off walls, air dashing, gliding through the air, being shot from cannons or bouncing from springboards or trampolines.

These mechanics, even in the context of other genres, are commonly called platforming.

Games where jumping is automated completely, such as 3D games in The Legend of Zelda series, fall outside of the genre.

As of 2006, the genre had become far less dominant, representing a two percentage market share as compared to fifteen percent in 1998; 3 however, the genre is still commercially viable, with a number of games selling in the millions of units.

Since 2010, a variety of endless running platformers for mobile devices have brought renewed popularity to the genre.

These games typically are either played from the side view using 2D movement or in 3D with the camera either in a first-person or third-person perspective.

Jumping can be categorized as either committed or variable; wherein the trajectory of a committed jump cannot be changed mid-air, that of a variable jump can.

Many platform games also have seemingly bottomless pits or other features within the game world that kill a character immediately were they to fall into them.

Its designer Shigeru Miyamoto called it a runningjumpingclimbing game while developing it.

Donkey Kong spawned a number of other titles with a mix of running, jumping, and vertical traversal, which were labeled climbing games in Steve Blooms 1982 book Video Invaders and 1983 magazines Electronic Games (US) and TV Gamer (UK).

In a December 1982 Creative Computing review of the Apple II game Beer Run, the reviewer used a different term: Im going to call this a ladder game, as in the ladder genre, which includes Apple Panic and Donkey Kong.

Most, but not all, early examples of platform games were confined to a static playing field, generally viewed in profile, and were based on climbing mechanics between platforms rather than jumping.

While the player has the ability to fall, there is no ability to jump, so the game does not satisfy most modern definitions of the genre.

However, it clearly influenced the genre, with gameplay centered on climbing ladders between different floors, a common element in many early platform games.

A difficult game to learn, Space Panic remained obscure as an arcade game, but the 1981 unauthorized clone Apple Panic was a hit for home computers.

Donkey Kong was ported to many consoles and computers at the time, notably as the system-selling pack-in game for ColecoVision, 14 and also a handheld version from Coleco in 1982.

The game helped cement Nintendos position as an important name in the video game industry internationally.

This title laid the groundwork for other two-player cooperative platformers such as Fairyland Story and Bubble Bobble.

Beginning in 1982, transitional games emerged that did not use scrolling graphics, but had levels that span several connected screens.

Dreamcast 3D Box Art