The 1982 arcade game Bump ‘n’ Jump has a lot of points in its favor. Especially compared to other games of its era, Bump ‘n’ Jump is…very fast-paced. The premise is simple enough. You play a car. Unlike normal cars, this one can jump very high. Which is helpful, because other cars are often trying to bump into it, and jumping helps it get out of their way. Any collision with an obstacle will destroy the car. But the player can also get more points by destroying other cars, by bumping them into obstacles. So, what went wrong, with what may well be the first effective and fun demonstration of vehicular combat?
As is often the case for retro video games, the problems for Bump ‘n’ Jump start with its ports. Coming out the November ahead of the Video Game Crash of 1983, Bump ‘n’ Jump is too late for the earliest wave of nostalgia. Sophisticated game engine notwithstanding, the console ports of Bump ‘n’ Jump effectively came out for the benefit of a dead market. And while Bump ‘n’ Jump was still a good enough game to feel fresh in the NES era, a very boneheaded decision by Data East, when they developed its port, doomed the game to obscurity.
To be entirely fair, Data East did have some decent ideas when they were developing the NES port. Instead of maintaining the infinite arcade style gameplay of the original title, they read the room after the entry of Super Mario Bros. and realized that games which can end were the wave of the future. The NES version of Bump ‘n’ Jump only has 16 levels, and a clearer objective of rescuing some princess-like figure who shouts, “help me!” at the beginning and every four stages afterwards. The vehicular destruction isn’t entirely wanton. The player now at least has a theoretical, achievable goal.
The problem is that this goal is way too difficult to achieve for the typical player. Bump ‘n’ Jump’s gameplay is inherently chaotic. The player is at the mercy of an often arbitrary, difficult to predict random number generator which guarantees that however many enemy cars they destroy, there will be an immediate replacement. At any given moment, the player is only a single bump away from certain death. And jumping is only so helpful when, if the player hasn’t memorized the level layout, they could easily find themselves leaping onto an extended obstacle. The excellent hit detection of Bump ‘n’ Jump is to the game’s detriment, as the game is quite unforgiving of the player being a pixel too close to anything off-road.
Even this wouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker for Bump ‘n’ Jump except that Data East failed to realize how the new age of console gaming benefited fast play. Bump ‘n’ Jump was already at a disadvantage here, since even at top speed, the game is effectively on rails. But the lack of a continue system made Bump ‘n’ Jump’s difficult gameplay virtually insurmountable. It simply wasn’t reasonable to expect a player to be able to finish sixteen levels with only three life-losing errors. Without cheating, few players could hope to confront the final boss- and the gameplay was repetitive enough that even skilled players were more likely than not to lose interest before they could get that far.
What could have saved Bump ‘n’ Jump? Just a more forgiving gameplay design probably would have done it. Simply upping the player’s starting lives from 3 to 10 makes playing the game feel much more skill-based than luck-based by improving the margin for error. The game actually has a built-in continue function- but instead of being automatic and limited, like games such as Contra, Bump ‘n’ Jump requires a fairly tedious second controller input in order to actually use a continue. And it’s easy for a raging player to forget to manually input that code in the event of an especially cheap kill. Even extra lives would have gone a long way to making Bump ‘n’ Jump more forgiving. Yet the game rather incredibly makes extra lives more difficult to get than in the previous versions, by upping the relevant score thresholds.
The end result of this? Hardly anyone who picks up the NES version of Bump ‘n’ Jump will ever even see the game’s latter levels, let alone its final boss fight. And that’s a real shame, since if Bump ‘n’ Jump weren’t so tedious to play through to the end, its fast-paced gameplay would almost certainly make it one of the more notable titles of the era. Which really just goes to show- even the most minor of decisions in a commercial release, can drastically affect its reputation decades after the fact,
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