Nintensive Care: Why Sky Skipper Was Justifiably Forgotten for Almost 40 Years

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By Garrett Martin | August 21, 2024 | 1:00pm

Video Games Features Sky Skipper

Nintensive Care: Why Sky Skipper Was Justifiably Forgotten for Almost 40 Years

How did Nintendo become the Nintendo we know today? Our column Nintensive Care tracks the history of Nintendo’s videogame era and its outsized influence on games and the gaming industry. This time around, we cover a 1981 game where you have to knock down a giant ape to rescue its helpless captive. That’s right: it’s Sky Skipper, a game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda that was released the same month as Donkey Kong, and that failed so spectacularly that no arcade version was actually playable to the public in America until 2017. Here’s the strange story of a forgotten Nintendo flop and its semi-redemption decades later.

In 1981 Donkey Kong was a smash. Nintendo’s tentative foray into arcades finally paid off huge, with Shigeru Miyamoto’s game earning more in Japanese arcades that year than any other game. In America it made Nintendo over $280 million by the end of 1982—money used to purchase land for Nintendo of America’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., where they’re still based today. It introduced the world to Mario and Donkey Kong, who co-starred in a Saturday morning cartoon in 1983 that marked their first steps towards the mainstream cultural ubiquity they’ve long enjoyed. It rescued Nintendo from the failure of Radar Scope, and insulated them from similar flops in the near-term future. That was fortunate, because their next game, Sky Skipper, was so disappointing it didn’t even get a real release anywhere.

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Sky Skipper shares some DNA with its far more successful cousin. Like Donkey Kong, it was designed by Miyamoto, at least in part; he and Genyo Takeda, who’s best known for the Punch-Out!! and StarTropics series and for co-developing the Wii, are credited as co-designers. Its Japanese arcade release featured Miyamoto’s artwork on its cabinets, and its villains were a whole crop of gorillas and not just one. On the surface, it seems random that one of Nintendo’s two similar releases from July ‘81 would become an iconic pillar of the medium, while the other would be forgotten for almost 40 years.

When you actually play the two games, their fates make a lot more sense. Donkey Kong was a groundbreaking game for the platformer genre, with memorable characters, loads of personality, great music, and a difficulty level that ramps up gradually enough to make a player feel like they aren’t being abused. Sky Skipper, on the other hand… well, it’s Sky Skipper.

I first wrote about Sky Skipper six years ago, after playing its salvaged arcade version at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo in 2017, and alongside its release through the Arcade Archives series on the Switch. Let’s lay it out as plainly as I did back then: it is not a good game. It is charming in its weirdness, though, and more unique and enjoyable than a lot of games that did succeed at the arcades back then. It’s an insignificant part of Nintendo’s history, but one still worth talking about before we get to the company’s golden age.

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The main problem with Sky Skipper is that it’s too complex by the standards of the day without being fun or rewarding enough to keep playing. You pilot an old-timey biplane around stages full of gorillas who’ve trapped various animals. You have to stagger those gorillas with bombs and rescue their captives before they come to, all while not touching anything on screen. You also have to keep an eye on your constantly depleting fuel gauge, which refills some when you rescue a critter. The animals also have playing card suits on them whose importance I have never been quite clear on. With four scrolling levels that repeat with increasing difficulty, Sky Skipper is an ambitious game, but not a well-designed one; the ship is hard to control, the apes aren’t incapacitated long enough, and their aim with the baseballs they hit at you is way too good. It’s all a bit of a jumble, both thematically and in how it plays. It’s obvious why the tighter, more focused Donkey Kong ate its lunch back in ‘81.

At least Nintendo of America was warned in advance about Sky Skipper. The July ‘81 release in Japan was a test roll-out, and response at arcades was so bad that it never went into full production over there. Somewhere between 10 and 12 test units were sent to Nintendo of America (sources seem to differ on this), and all but one of them were eventually converted to one of Nintendo’s next legit hits, 1982’s Popeye. (More on that game soon!) The sole Sky Skipper cabinet in America languished in obscurity at Nintendo of America HQ for over 30 years, until a group of preservationists were allowed to scan its artwork for its recreation of the game—a recreation that also required converting one of those Popeye arcade boards back into Sky Skipper using ROMs of the original game. That’s how I first played Sky Skipper before it was released on the Switch through Arcade Archives in 2018. So now this forgotten failure is officially playable in the home—somehow for the second time.

Weirdly enough, despite not cutting it in arcades in either Japan or America, a home version of Sky Skipper was released for the Atari 2600 in 1983. Parker Brothers snagged the license alongside the home rights to Popeye, which, if that was mandated by Nintendo, was a canny way to recoup at least some money from this flop. Atari’s market was collapsing in 1983, of course, and that 2600 port of Sky Skipper didn’t make any kind of a splash. That biplane and those ornery apes were roundly rejected everywhere they went.

Not every game can be a grand slam. Miyamoto might’ve knocked it out of the park with Donkey Kong, but every young artist is going to make a few failures before consistently hitting the sweet spot. We don’t know how Sky Skipper’s failure impacted Nintendo or Miyamoto’s approach to designing games, but we do know that their next two arcade titles, both released in 1982, were far better, more successful, and more memorable—and they were both obviously inspired by Donkey Kong, with no sign of any influence from Sky Skipper. And we’ll talk about one of those games in the next Nintensive Care.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.