Keystone Kapers

Programmer Gary Kitchen designed Keystone Kapers just after finishing the 2600 version of Donkey Kong for Coleco. "My mindset was on a little man character running and jumping," said Kitchen. "Also, I wanted to do a game that was funny. The idea of a Keystone Kop chasing a Krook was both funny and supplied the player with a good guy / bad guy conflict."

In designing Keystone Kapers, there were two major obstacles that Kitchen ran into: the ROM size and the number of objects that could be displayed on a scan line of a TV screen. "The ROM size was extremely tight in this game. I probably spent the last month of development (out of five months) cutting bytes and packing the code to fit. It was probably the tightest fitting game cart I ever programmed." Kitchen also developed a new technique that allowed him to display two objects with multiple colors on the same TV scan line. "It wasn't the only game, or the first, with two multi-colored objects per line, but the technique allowed some added flexibility in programming the display. I used the technique again later in future 2600 products." Kitchen overcame these obstacles and the result is a challenging game.

Kitchen described the game in its early stages: "At one point, Keystone Kapers had a really neat old-fashioned car parked in front of the department store as window dressing, but because of memory restraints I had to remove it. Early versions of the game had the Kop scaling the side of a vertically scrolling building, chasing the Krook, who was dropping objects down on the Kop - chairs, bowling balls, etc." Since it looked too much like Donkey Kong or Crazy Climber (by Atari), David Crane advised Kitchen to make Keystone Kapers a side-scrolling game like Pitfall.

There are plenty of obstacles to avoid in this game, including bouncing balls and biplanes, and shopping carts. Kitchen describes an interesting strategy - Jump and run two steps for shopping carts, duck and run three steps for biplanes.

One other feature that would have been neat if it was added would be two-player action. Wouldn't it be fun for one player to control the Kop and one to control the Krook? Again, this option was available in Oink (by Activision). Perhaps there was not enough memory to include this.

Keytone Kapers was also available for the Atari 8-bit computers. The only difference to my knowledge is a musical background.

Back in the 1980s, Activision used to give out embroidered game club patches if you got a high score, took a picture of your TV screen, and mailed it to them. Here is the high score to shoot for:

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