Sky Skipper is Arcade Game developed by Nintendo and created in 1981 by Shigeru Miyamoto and Genyo Takeda, in between the completion of Donkey Kong and Popeye. It is one of a handful of games that Nintendo had fully completed, but never officially released.
The game is a peculiar variation of the Shoot 'Em Up genre popular at the time. You play as Mr. You, a pilot in a biplane who is tasked with saving The King and his royal family from a gang of marauding gorillas. Your main method of attack are bombs, which can be dropped to stun the gorillas of a limited period of time. When a gorilla is stunned, the king, queen and other members of the royal court will be released from their cages and pop in and out of the ground, which you save by flying into them. The gorillas are armed with clubs bombs of their own, and you lose a life by flying into either the gorillas themselves or their bombs. Your fuel gauge also gradually ticks down, which can be replenished by collecting the royal family. Similar to Rally-X and Bosconian, the screen scrolls in all four directions instead of just horizontally or vertically.
The game was fully completed with an eye towards a 1981 release, and Nintendo tested it in different markets in both Japan and America. To their surprise, Nintendo found that players in both markets were turned off by the complex (for the time) gameplay and confusing amalgamation of disparate themes. Howard Phillips of Nintendo of America denounced the game as being no less than "an LSD trip". As a result of this poor reception, Nintendo released only a few cabinets in Japan and cancelled the release of the game in all other territories. Almost all of the Sky Skipper cabinets were converted to play Popeye instead.
However, Parker Brothers had already licensed the American home console rights (as a means of shoring up porting rights to Popeye), and was able to squeeze out a lone port for the Atari 2600. This port greatly simplifies the gameplay to account for the 2600's limited graphical capabilities, and only scrolls vertically. For 37 years, it was the only official release of the game in any form.
While the arcade version was never released in North America, Nintendo of America maintained a single working cabinet from the focus test. In 2015, fans used pictures of this lone holdout, and a rare dump of the arcade board, to construct a fully-working replica of the game as originally intended. In 2018, Hamster released the arcade original on the Nintendo Switch as part of their Arcade Archives series, using Nintendo's lone cabinet as the source of the ROM.
Not to be confused with Sky Kid.
Sky Skipper provides examples of:
- Killer Gorilla: The villains of the game are bomb-throwing gorillas.
- Lead You Can Relate To: To the point where he is named "Mr. You".
- Public Domain Soundtrack: A snippet of "Skip To My Lou" is used as the introductory jingle.
- Precision F-Strike: When you complete a level, the captured Gorilla will proclaim "Damn it. I'll escape."
- Technical Pacifist: Mr. You's bombs don't kill the Gorillas, but knock them out for a short amount of time.
