Isometric platformer

Congo Bongo is an early isometric platformer.

An isometric platformer is a genre of video game which takes the formula for a platformer and turns it 45 degrees to have an isometric perspective. Presenting the game in a simulated 3D space allows more freedom for the designers, but also makes things more difficult for the programmer. And, due to the movements following diagonal instead of orthogonal paths, isometric platformers are notorious for having controls that take a lot of getting used to. Also, while the isometric perspective creates a pseudo-3D feeling, it is still a 2D game, so it isn't quite a 3D platformer.

Personal

Because it wasn't that popular of a genre, I didn't have access to an isometric platformer until I was in middle school when I got a copy of Crystal Castles for my Atari 2600. I liked the game, but didn't think too highly of it. I knew of the existence of Q*bert when I was younger, but didn't play it until the late 1990s when NES emulation became popular, at which time, I found it too simplistic to be interesting. I played a few other action games with an isometric perspective like Snake Rattle N Roll and Mystic Towers, but always found it difficult to visually line up targets on a 45 degree angle, so I typically stayed away from them.

History

Isometric platformers were made shortly after the first platformers. The first appears to be Q*bert, released on 1982-10-18. To compensate for the diagonal-only movements, the original arcade release mounted the joystick at a 45° in the control panel. The game was quite popular, particularly among female players, but it was also pretty simplistic. It was followed up by more complex games like Congo Bongo released on 1983-02-14, and Crystal Castles, released on 1983-07-08, which used a trackball for its controls. Although the genre never became a mainstay, it did see some popularity on the ZX Spectrum during the mid-to-late-1980s. However, once 3D platformers became popular in the mid-1990s, there wasn't much use for the genre, though it did see a couple games on handheld consoles before they could process true 3D.

Games

This is a list of isometric platformers that are important to me. For all games in this genre, see the category.

Title	Released	Developer
Crystal Castles	1983-07-08	Atari

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