Cinematic platformer
A cinematic platformer is a hybrid video game genre which combines cinematic concepts with platformers. There are several themes which are common to most cinematic platformers including the use of a 2D side-view perspective, lots of jumping and climbing over platforms, heavy use of cutscenes, rotoscoped characters, trial and death game play with gruesome animations, and checkpoints rather than lives.
Contents
Personal
My cousin Brian got a copy of Prince of Persia in the early 1990s, and he and I were astounded by the game's fluid animation. However, we discovered it was also brutally difficult, so we didn't get much further than a few levels in before getting bored of it. Thankfully, my uncle found a trainer for the game, so we were able to cheat our way to the end to see more of the game. In the mid-1990s, my friend Kevin got Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & the Flame and he and I played that game even more, getting pretty far into it before finding it too difficult and giving up. I think the next game I one I played was a demo of BlackThorne around 1995, then Heart of Darkness at the end of the 1990s. While I've always loved the animation and gruesome death scenes in these games, I've also found them pretty tedious to play, so I've never cared that much for them.
History
Donkey Kong was instrumental in defining the platformer genre in 1981, and it also introduced aspects of cinema with its brief cutscenes and similarities to King Kong. As hardware improved, and it became possible to increase the cinematic aspects of the game further, precursors in 1984 include Impossible Mission and Karateka which used rotoscoping of live actors for more fluid character animation, and, although the hardware still prevented depth in the story, the games had clear similarities to action films. The title that really brought the cinematic platformer genre into its own was Prince of Persia in 1989 which uses a One Thousand and One Nights theme, and adds in swashbuckling sword fighting, parkour jumping and climbing, diabolical booby traps, and lots of cutscenes. Other big names helped cement the genre like Out of This World in 1991 and Flashback in 1992, which use more frequent checkpoints. 2D platformers fell out of favor in the late 1990s, so the cinematic platformer genre has remained fairly small, but each year still sees a couple new titles.
Jordan Mechner is very important to the genre as he was the lead designer of both Karateka and Prince of Persia, as is Éric Chahi who was the lead designer of Out of This World and Heart of Darkness.
Examples
This is a list of cinematic platformers that are important to me, for all platformers, see the category.
| Title | Released | Developer |
|---|---|---|
| BlackThorne | 1994-09-?? | Blizzard Entertainment |
| Heart of Darkness | 1998-07-04 | Amazing Studio |
| Out of This World | 1991-11-?? | Delphine Software |
| Prince of Persia | 1989-10-03 | Brøderbund |
| Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & the Flame | 1993-05-?? | Brøderbund |
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