Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima (2003, PS2, Gamecube)

             

Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima, released as Adventure Island in 1988 for the US NES after a 1986 arcade release (more or less) as Wonderboy, is your original “runner” game. It’s the Ur-Jetpac Joyride; the proto-Canabalt. Super Mario Bros. (1985) scrolled from left to right while obstacles moved from right to left first and Pitfall!! (1982) Pac Land (1983) before that, but I trace the runner genre’s Adam to the later Takahashi because it emphasizes something Mario and Pac Land do not: locomotion.

In Pac Land and Super Mario, there are two ways for the player to lose a life: he can succumb to an obstacle such a right-to-left scrolling enemy or drop into a pit. The Pitfall!! player loses score the same way. The other means by which a player can lose in any of these three games is by the timer reaching “0.” In Takahashi, a player loses a life for falling down a pit, but more interesting is what happens when he hits one of the games innumerable rock obstacles. He does not lose a life and does not lose score. He loses time.

Health and time are conflated in Takahashi. Colliding with a rock removes several timer bars. Collecting fruit replenishes several bars. It also ticks away on its own, and it ticks fast. It depletes so fast, in fact, that some of the game’s later stages require a foot on the gas at all times to clear. Playing Takahashi well means practically never stopping. To watch a skilled Takahashi player is to watch him turn it into Temple Run, a game where you can literally never stop.

Hudson Soft’s programmers recognized the urgency their health/timer bar instilled. Their level design anticipates the player who is always holding forward; at no point does Takahashi require you stop and wait for a platform or backtrack. The controls do as well. They know you want to run, so they do not require the holding of a button to do it. Instead, Higgins naturally builds momentum the longer he is kept in motion. The skateboard power-up pushes him forward even faster and on his own. Automatic movement defines the runner game. This is one of the earliest instances of it.

The Takahashi remake is more faithful than PC Genjin’s because of the original’s meticulous design. Shifting the placement of an enemy by a space or two could potentially collapse the design of the entire level if there were no way for the always-holding-right player to avoid it. In my PC Genjin post, I praised it for remaining within the spirit of the original without replicating it. I would argue that Takahashi, in spite of being a nearly pixel-for-pixel recreation of the original, is in the spirit of the original as well: painstaking obstacle placement is part of Takahashi’s spirit. Hudson, especially latter-day Hudson, had a knack for acknowledging what made their games great. It’s not by accident that making the longest jump possible while on the skateboard in Takahashi is nearly always safe. It’s the result of adroit design and rigorous testing. Like so many great games and movies, Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima is only making it look easy.

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