PixlBit

One of the releases today on the eShop and the PS Store was the Arcade Archives version of Kangaroo, made by Sunsoft. Kangaroo was originally published in the US by Atari, which had begun supplementing it's own output with licensed games from Japan after the success of Space Invaders and Pac-Man.

Kangaroo was licensed as Atari's attempt to cash in on the success of Nintendo's Donkey Kong. It is a four screen platformer like DK. You are a mother kangaroo whose joey was kidnapped by monkeys, so you have to climb to the top of the level and rescue your baby. Mama Kangaroo is a circus boxing kangaroo, so she can punch out the monkeys if they are close enough. In addition to being deadly if touched, the monkeys attack by throwing fruit, so Mama Kangaroo must jump over, duck, or even punch the fruit as necessary. There's even a boxing gorilla, just like that other famous gorilla, that appears if you stay in a stage long enough. You have to punch him at the right time, or he'll grab your boxing gloves and leave you defenseless - when you push a button without the gloves, your Kangaroo will hold up a white surrender flag! Due to home hardware limitations, the gorilla was only in the arcade version and was left out of the 2600, 5200, and 8-bit versions.

On your way up there are fruits to grab. There's also a bell, which will replace and upgrade any fruits you grab, from strawberries to apples to cherries to pineapples, which are worth 800 points apiece. You have to backtrack in the level if you want to make the most points from the fruit. Kangaroo has a bonus timer like DK, but it only has 2000 points at the start, and decreases very slowly, so if you're quick you can completely upgrade and grab all of the fruit all the way up to four pineapples. The big danger is that you have to brave the monkeys and the gorilla as well as keep from falling in order to score big points with the fruit.

Stage three was a little different. Joey was locked in a cage atop a platform held up by a column of monkeys. You could either punch out the monkeys in the columns to lower it or let more monkeys pile on to raise it. There was also a trap which, when enough monkeys were piled up on it, would release a barrage of apples falling down the screen, so you had to keep an eye on that. Given that the fourth stage was a more straightforward platforming level, I always wondered why this wasn't the "boss" stage like the rivet level in DK.

Kangaroo was fairly successful in its time, selling a respectable 10K arcade machines. Atari ported it to all of their consoles and home computers. Atari seemed to have a potential mascot on its hands, but with the 1983 video game crash and Sunsoft turning to licensed platformers as well as its signature game, Blaster Master, on the NES, Kangaroo faded into obscurity before Arcade Archives brought it back. But it even had its own segment on CBS's Saturday Supercade, a cartoon anthology that also featured DK, Frogger, Q*Bert, and Pitfall. Atari versions had cartoon "hopping" noises when the kangaroo is moved, but the Japanese version plays a public domain song in the background as many games did back then. I think the song in Kangaroo is Schumann's "The Happy Farmer."

However, Atari's in-house developers resented the Japanese imports Atari was licensing. Kangaroo was particularly reviled by Atari engineers because they thought it looked cheap compared to Atari's 3-D vector graphics games (its graphics do flicker somewhat) and because Atari was spending more money marketing Kangaroo than they were on the game Atari was developing in-house at the time, Gravitar. One of the lead designers of Gravitar wrote a company wide memo bashing Kangaroo and criticizing Atari management for promoting it over Atari's in-house products. Surprisingly, he kept his job. To add insult to injury, Kangaroo sold much better than Gravitar did when both games were released. 

So here's another blast from the past and a piece of American arcade history. Kangaroo was no Donkey Kong, but it's a fun game and I played it a lot on my Atari home compute. Check it out if you're interested in classic arcade games.