Platformers are the best video games. We all instinctively know this. To play a platformer is to experience raw, unfiltered video game essence, inasmuch as we broadly define “video games” as “you play as a guy, get through an obstacle course.” By no means are other genres inferior; platformers simply deliver, on average, more video game per square inch, cutting directly to the delicious tactile center of what makes the medium tick. They are design fundamentals, distilled.
Assessing the quality of platformers almost always boils down to determining how well movement and level design work in concert. When a game is this straightforward - again, you play as a guy, and you get through an obstacle course - the guy better be fun to play as, and the obstacle course better be interesting. There could be other factors at play, but if these two aren’t nailed, the whole experience inevitably falls apart.
By these metrics, Super Monkey Ball is probably the best game ever made.
Super Monkey Ball is video games, sans middlemen. It’s the rock-solid crystallization of a perfectly straight line between two points, respectively labeled “A” and “B” in bright red 72-point Helvetica. There is no “goofing off” in Super Monkey Ball. Hell, there’s no jumping in Super Monkey Ball. The only part of the controller you ever touch is the left analog stick, and the most time you ever spend completing a level is fifty-nine seconds and ninety-nine centiseconds. Your one, singular, thunderously clear objective: “GO.”
I like to imagine that the pitch meeting for Super Monkey Ball went something like this. Director-producer Toshihiro Nagoshi, known chiefly at this time for his terrific work on Daytona (and known now as the man behind the Yakuza franchise), stands up in front of his colleagues and clears his throat. “In this game,” he says, “you are a monkey in a ball, rolling across floating stages. If you get to the end, you win. If you fall off or run out of time, you lose.”
Some confused murmurs from around the table. Finally, someone speaks up. “What can the monkey do?” The corners of Nagoshi’s mouth curl into a slight smile.
“Nothing,” he says. “Absolutely nothing.”
Brief, stunned silence, and then the entire board room erupts into rapturous applause. They program a physics engine, design 118 courses, and throw in a half-dozen minigames just because they can. The game releases to mass critical acclaim and makes several trillion dollars. This all happens over the course of about three weeks.
Even if the actual pitch was more complex, could it really have been by much? I have difficulty imagining a summary of Super Monkey Ball that takes more than a minute to verbalize. All I’d add to the above description is that the courses are neatly partitioned into distinct, arcade-style difficulty modes - Beginner, Advanced, Expert, and Master - and each course is dotted with collectible bananas, one hundred of which grant an extra life. Beyond that, there really isn’t much. You have the guy and the obstacle course. The rest is up to you.
In Super Monkey Ball, characters aren’t directly controllable - instead, players manipulate the stages themselves, precision-tilting them to guide the monkey safely to the goal (there are four playable monkeys, but the differences between them are purely cosmetic). This takes some getting used to, but from the outset, it feels right. The ball is appropriately weighty, and the extreme sensitivity of the controls ensures that no input, regardless of how minor, is wasted. After providing ample space for free experimentation, the game begins carefully removing the training wheels spoke-by-spoke until, eventually and triumphantly, a steady hyperawareness of its intricate movement principles takes hold. At even higher skill levels, players stop merely sparring with Super Monkey Ball and start actively exploiting it, manipulating stages with such subatomic accuracy that supposedly mandatory sections are exposed as bypassable. These are not “glitches." Cheating at Super Monkey Ball is entirely possible within the developer-sanctioned confines of its physics engine, and doing so reflects mastery, not laziness, on the part of the player. It’s why speedruns of the game are so appealing: every level, no matter how simple, is infinitely malleable.
And Super Monkey Ball's level design - that crucial second platforming ingredient - luxuriates directly on the gilded crossroads of "so simple a child could have done it" and "so genius nobody could have done it." Every stage (or "floor," as they're referred to in-game) demands unique, creative applications of the game’s physics, either introducing wholly new concepts or iterating constructively on old ones. The beauty is that, with how few mechanics there are in Super Monkey Ball, these concepts don’t even register as “concepts,” but rather as natural, almost invisible extensions of what was always there. In a more complex platformer, new concepts could take the form of, say, special enemy types or level-specific powerups. In Super Monkey Ball, new concepts are “slightly curved surfaces” and “platforms that move.”
Take Beginner floor 10 (out of a total 10) as an example. This stage consists of several flat platforms bridged by inclines, followed by a winding path to the goal. Small guard rails gird the first segment, and the final path’s width is relatively forgiving. Later, you may notice that Advanced floor 17 (out of a total 30) looks familiar. It’s the same basic layout, but the guard rails are gone, the inclines are steeper, and the path is slimmer. Later still comes Expert floor 7 (out of a total 50), the final variation. Here, inclines are steep enough to require running starts, a previously solid patch of land has been swiss cheesed into multiple tiny platforms, and the final path is twice as long and razor-thin. Each of these stages tweaks the level design enough that new challenges present themselves, while simultaneously maintaining a core familiarity that invites players to draw deep from the well of past experience. And in all the stages between, the game ramps up difficulty almost imperceptibly, such that by the time you reach Expert floor 7, you could beat Beginner floor 10 with your eyes closed.
To be clear, though, Super Monkey Ball is hard. It's so hard that doctors play it to warm up their hand-eye coordination before performing laparoscopic surgery. The aforementioned Expert floor 7 is actually one of the more infamously challenging levels, heavily spiking difficulty early in the mode, and this speaks to the brilliance of the game's difficulty curve: an exquisite sine wave that slowly, deliberately arcs up to the promised land. Though linear challenge progression may seem logical on paper - "the more you play, the harder it gets" - in practice, it's stifling. The best-paced games methodically ease players in and out of their more demanding moments, coaxing them forward without necessarily overwhelming them. Even within Super Monkey Ball's individual modes, difficulty fluctuates, sometimes wildly. Certain stages become inflection points in a playthrough, functioning either as brief reprieves or tough-as-nails platforming gut checks - a dichotomy I like to call "breathers" and "seethers." Expert floor 7 is a seether. Expert floor 8, one of the most easily shortcuttable levels in the game, is a breather. Expert floor 9 falls somewhere in the middle - you might even call it a "neither."
Master mode, unlocked only after completing Expert without using any continues, is where the curve crescendos. It consists of only ten courses, at least seven of which make me want to chew my fingers off. On the other hand, when I hit that ridge at just the right angle and go careening through the final goalpost, I feel like God. Super Monkey Ball has been described as "sadistic," but it always struck me more as an exercise in tough love. It’s punishing, yes, but only because it knows best. It forces you to master, on a fundamental level, video games.
More and more, this sort of mechanical simplicity feels like a dying art. I strongly suspect that, were the first Super Monkey Ball released as-is in the current milieu, it would be seen as not having “enough.” Enough what? Stuff? Stuff is overrated. We’ve already seen the debilitating effects of stuff on Super Monkey Ball: starting with Super Monkey Ball 2, the original’s immaculate candor began slipping away, as stages skewed more toward button-pressing gimmicks and labyrinthine puzzle-box designs that failed to make interesting use of the engine. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, a Wii launch title, marked the series’ death knell. Here, the monkeys had “stats.” There were bosses. You could jump. Suddenly, inexplicably, Super Monkey Ball resembled every other game.
The original, meanwhile, resembles only the skeleton of other games, perfectly preserved, each bone bleached stark white and polished to a high sheen. Movement, level design. Guy, obstacle course. Super Monkey Ball’s developers zeroed in on these rudiments with unwavering focus, never letting overambition cloud common sense. Not one iota of the game is poorly conceived. It’s flawless, by virtue of never giving itself an opportunity to not be.
It is, profoundly, a platformer.