5) Jumping
First seen in: Donkey Kong – Arcade (1981)
Imagine how bad a modern game would be if you couldn’t jump. (Who said Dead Space??) I mean seriously, how would you get over that fence, or those crocodiles, or that gross pile of corpses? Probably the weirdest part about this particular mechanic is that despite having a button assigned to it in every game that will ever be released for the rest of time, it’s not something you really see anyone do in real life. When was the last time you were walking down the street and saw a person just doing a jump? Even an open manhole cover would simply illicit the action of ‘walking around it’.
Still, we live in 3D. No such luxuries were afforded back then and if there was so much as a half-eaten banana on the floor, you had no choice but to leap over it. It seems strange that now computers have caught up to real-life’s three-dimensional nature, the ‘jump’ button has endured. Even games where jumping is completely redundant, (Doom 3, anyone?) the button still sits there, just in case.
But as much as it’s shoehorned in to first-person shooters, we can’t deny its fundamentalism. Without it, a game just feels weird. Plus, there would be no such thing as platform games and subsequently no Mario, no Sonic, and to a lesser extent no Earthworm Jim. Mario, by the way, is the secret innovator here. He’s the guy you’re playing as in Donkey Kong – though at the time, our Italian stereotyped hero was simply called Jump Man, which is quite fitting.
