Ice Climber
Introduction
Ice Climber was developed by Nintendo R&D1, directed by Kenji Miki with Masayuki Uemura and Shigeru Miyamoto producing, and programmed by Kazuaki Morita and Toshihiko Nakago, releasing in Japan in January 1985 and reaching North America that October on both the NES and the arcade VS. System. It came right after the same core team finished Excitebike, and the group would go on to build Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda immediately afterward, with this game marking the very first project Morita ever programmed before he became the lead programmer on Super Mario Bros itself. Players control climber Popo, or Nana in two-player mode, smashing through ice blocks with a mallet while ascending a single vertically scrolling mountain screen by screen, timing jumps between platforms and dodging falling icicles and enemy creatures like Topis and Nitpickers before a bonus round lets players leap up to grab a vegetable for extra points. Though it sold a respectable million and a half copies and later saw its characters resurface in the Super Smash Bros series, Ice Climber was quickly overshadowed by the landmark games its own development team released right afterward.
