Rapid technological progress has instilled many of us with the belief that videogames have exponentially improved over the medium’s short history – becoming more playable, immersive, or realistic experiences. Time has not been kind to a lot of older games, we say. Maybe they were too mazey, obtuse, bullshit hard, or just completely uninspired. Maybe they actually did have good ideas, but they’re in need of a reboot or HD remaster to be relevant to the current generation. Or maybe they’re absolutely sacred and perfect in every way, never to be questioned lest you face the wrath of fans. Most games, however, are inevitably left to the dustbins of history for one reason or another. And this is to be expected.

But game fans and members of this industry often take this whole process several steps further, to the point of self-parody. Certain marquee games or franchises are widely acknowledged and talked about – Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Metal Gear, Contra, Pokemon, Mega Man, etc – but this paints a very limited picture of the industry’s output over the last 35-40 years. The hyper-focus on what was popular and sold well often ignores what was the most creative and unique. It’s not any kind of stretch to say the game industry has thrown many developers and designers under the bus over the years with its relentless focus on IPs and branding ahead of people. I believe very strongly this has led to a homogenization of games, particularly in the mainstream space. In the US in particular, the console-centric focus of most games media (especially of the past) leaves out a huge swath of strange and interesting computer games from the 80’s and 90’s. This all creates a much blander image of the medium as a whole to outsiders – one that just doesn’t match up with the reality.

To take this point further: In my view, even the most embarrassing or bizarre videogame disasters can often be the most unintentionally creative or interesting, if we throw away conventional expectations of playability or presentation. Sometimes they are even 100% brilliant, when taken on their own terms.

Such is Jumping Flash, a first-person 3D platformer released for the Playstation 1 in 1995. In it, you control a robot rabbit who must find several carrot-shaped “jetpods” placed over different floating islands in order to save the planet. These islands are landmasses extracted from the earth by an evil astrophysicist named Baron Aloha. While it was a few months late of being a system launch title, Jumping Flash was featured on the first PS1 demo disc, presumably functioning as a sort of tech demo to show off the 3D capabilities on Sony’s (at the time) brand new console. For the time it must have looked very impressive – the environments are big and wide-open, and there’s a lot of variety in the presentation of its stages even with its fairly short running time. There’s an amusement park with a few moving rides, a slippery ice world, and sci-fi themed levels with trippy visuals, as well as some more traditional dungeon crawler-esque levels. The theme of the game is cutesy in a sort of tongue-in-cheek, absurdist way that might have inspired later games like Katamari Damacy. Outside of the blocky visuals, it’s a game that often doesn’t seem very much in tune with its era.

Many fans who now look back kindly on games from 8- and 16-bit consoles tend to lament the datedness and clunkiness of most early 3D games. It seems like every new day there’s another game critic or YouTube gaming personality playing through an early PS1 or N64 game and lamenting their bad controls, screwy camera, or primitive polygons. I’m sure it’s in part because I remember that era very well, but something in this touches a raw nerve with me. But Jumping Flash is something even the most vehement early 3D detractors have to admit still works for what it is.

Because 3D on game consoles in 1995 was still extremely constrained by hardware limitations, game developers were often experimented a lot to find anything that would work in this brand new space. Maybe the extreme popularity of first-person games in 1995 explain why Jumping Flash is a first-person platformer, a unique decision both for its time and now. Most conventional wisdom nowadays says that first-person platforming hardly ever works; it’s just far too awkward to navigate and aim where you’re jumping when your character has permanent tunnel vision. But, even though there is no option to freely look around the world, it still works here. This is because the designers tilted the camera downward whenever your character is in the air, giving you plenty of time to float around and choose your destination before landing. Your character also has a very large, visible shadow and a generous landing hitbox, which makes jumping around the world feel really fun, not cumbersome or difficult. The focus on the pure arcade silliness of flying around in an abstract floating 3D space while bouncing off colorful enemies and objects works very much to its advantage. Even today, it feels like kind of a novel experience – and not like much else out there.

One major feature of Jumping Flash’s world is that, like many 3D games of its time, it’s extremely foggy. This is due to the game engine’s extremely limited rendering ability. But thankfully, this is not too much of a problem here – the game points out the location of each jetpod needed to complete the stage both on your radar and on the ingame screen. That may seem like more of a modern design choice – one which might ruin the challenge – but is actually pretty necessary because of the short distance you can see in front of you. Strangely, the combination of the engine’s low visibility range and the jetpod radar strikes a weird balance between the game being too cryptic or challenging to navigate vs. the game telling you too much what to do. You will invariably still get lost on the way to your destination in this low-res world, but never for so long that it gets too frustrating. And anyway, it’s fun to wander around and float around, exploring all the details of the world. It’s a bit, again, like Katamari Damacy in that way.

Jumping Flash is not particularly dismissed by the current generation of gamers – actually, it’s quite well-regarded, and the first two entries of the series are available on PSN for purchase. But many will still lament the primitive polygonal visuals, asking for an HD remaster or remake. I’m definitely not one of those people. There’s something so self-assured and matter-of-fact in the simple architecture in the game that I find really cool and unique. Floating platforms take on whatever shape or dimensions they want to. Even the buildings you see in the later city levels are more like suggestions of buildings rather than actual places. It creates a sort of unique, hazy atmosphere that is interesting on its own as a visual style.

I love the jagged, simple edges of the characters’ polygonal models too. The abstraction gives them a lot of character. They tend to look like they’re always shifting in place, moving and bending in an interesting way. For this particular kind of game, this works well with the abstract, cartoony, absurdist presentation. The only thing that I feel less excited about is the goofy pre-rendered cutscenes, but they work pretty well with ridiculous tone of the game. In general, I can’t imagine this game would be much improved by a remaster or remake without losing a lot of its unique character.

Besides, I find the environments of early 3D games often very evocative in ways I can’t say about many modern games, or even many games of the early 2000’s. The mech first person shooter Kileak: The DNA Imperative, a US Playstation 1 launch title, is incredibly monotonous and might ultimately be forgettable. Yet there’s also a very spooky, alien quality to its environments that are not something that could ever really be captured by newer technology. And I feel like that makes it a valuable experience, even if not in a conventional way, or one that might not have been completely intended by the developers. I even like the extremely bizarre abstraction of the infamously terrible mascot-platformer Bubsy 3D because it feels so different from anything else, even of that era. It’s not conventionally “good”, sure, but it certainly elicits a strong response.

I feel like there’s a lot of texture to these kind of early polygonal models and the highly abstract environments that was lost when we moved to the plastic doll-like models and bland template environments of the Playstation 2 era. And I like to think they didn’t die in that era. After all, some recent arty indie games like Oneiric Gardens or Goblet Grotto or Bubsy 3D Visits The James Turrell Retrospective exploit the strangeness of these early 3D environments to their advantage. I think this shows that they still have a lot of value that often goes acknowledged.

Really, I love the blocky worlds of games like Jumping Flash because in 1995, they conjured up the idea that anything is possible in this strange new world of 3D, long before industry-wide rules standardized what was and wasn’t acceptable to do in a 3D videogame space. Even now, there’s a great mystery to the environments of many early 3D games. They almost feel as if they hint at something else, something beyond what you’d ever expect or anticipate to see in a commercial videogame. My first few times playing Mario 64, I recall how taken aback I was by the fake staircase to Bowser on the 2nd floor, or how intrigued I was by the couple paintings that changed the world depending on how you entered them. Or I look now at the later, bizarre stages of the first Tomb Raider, which seem to break any kind of representational reality into something far more bizarre and surreal.

3D in these games is often a strange and different world to the modern eyes, filled with arcane symbols and seemingly unintuitive ways of traversing across it. The fabric of the place you’re in might fall out from under you at any moment and the rules might change – it’s all so abstract that you just have no idea what to expect. In spite of their sometimes primitive clunkiness and obtuse progression, I’d rather spend my time entering into these kind of mysterious worlds; worlds which might hint at something deeper and more abstract inside me than typical fare.

Sounds a lot more meaningful to me than a world where the rules are always set out for me and I know exactly what to expect.

Jumping Flash!