| Sky Skipper | |
|---|---|
 Japanese arcade flyer | |
| Developer(s) | |
| Publisher(s) | Nintendo Parker Brothers (2600) |
| Designer(s) | Genyo Takeda Shigeru Miyamoto |
| Platform(s) | Arcade, Atari 2600 |
| Release | Arcade July 1981[1] Atari 2600
|
| Genre(s) | Action |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Sky Skipper[a] is an arcade video game released by Nintendo in 1981. The player pilots a biplane and must save animals and a royal family from gorillas holding them captured. This is done by dropping bombs on the gorillas to knock them out and unlock the cages, then diving down towards the cages to pick up the freed characters before the gorillas lock the cages again. An Atari 2600 port was released in 1983.
The game was poorly received in location testing and was never widely released. The cabinets were converted into Popeye machines for release the following year. Nintendo of America stored one cabinet in its archives which is now the only known Sky Skipper cabinet remaining in the world. The cabinet was scanned and photographed by arcade enthusiasts in 2016, who also sourced one of four known remaining Sky Skipper arcade boards to build a faithful cabinet restoration. The board from the Nintendo of America cabinet is the only known unmodified boardset of the game. Hamster Corporation were able to reference the only known working Sky Skipper arcade board in Japan via the cooperation of exA-Arcadia and used the ROM image from this board[3] to release it on the Nintendo Switch eShop under license from Nintendo in 2018 as part of the Arcade Archives series of digital download titles.
- ^ "Game Machine" (1981/07/15), page 3 (in Japanese). Retrieved 5 May 2022.
- ^ McFerran, Damien (February 26, 2018). "Feature: Shining A Light On Ikegami Tsushinki, The Company That Developed Donkey Kong". Nintendo Life. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
- ^ "exA-Arcadia Supports Release of Sky Skipper on Nintendo Switch". exA-Arcadia. March 24, 2019. Retrieved June 29, 2024.
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