Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest

About Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest

Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest (1986) is Williams' sequel to Joust, with a vertical screen, distinct themed levels and a knight who can turn his ostrich into a pegasus, released after the golden age and now a rare cabinet.

Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest in Depth

As before, the player is a yellow knight on a flying ostrich, steered with a two-way joystick while a button flaps its wings; tapping faster climbs, steadily hovers and slowly sinks. Each wave is cleared by colliding with enemy knights on buzzards, and the rider whose lance is higher wins, while equal heights bounce both apart. A second player can cooperate or fight. Instead of the original's single evolving screen, each level has its own theme and gameplay, with backgrounds inspired by M. C. Escher, lead designer John Newcomer's favourite artist.

New elements include a transform button that turns the ostrich into a pegasus, stronger on the ground but a poor flyer, eggs that become mutant buzzards if they fall in the lava, a giant Shadow Lord riding scorpion-tailed buzzards, Crystal Bats that hatch from crystals in the ledges, and a Gold Egg that opens a rapidly changing box of random effects. Some events have synthesised speech, and buying in to continue keeps the current score.

Making Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest

With Williams' video game department shrunk by the industry's decline, the company wanted to sell a conversion kit for the then-popular vertical-monitor cabinets, and management felt a sequel would sell the kit better. Newcomer led development again on more advanced hardware than the original's, programmed like other Williams games in assembly language. Released after the golden age, it did not match Joust's critical or commercial success, which Allgame and Retro Gamer put down to the mid-1980s slump, and its cabinets have become fairly rare. It was never ported to home systems at the time, appearing only in compilations from Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Midway Collection 2 in 1997 to Midway Arcade Treasures and Midway Arcade Origins. IGN called its inclusion part of that collection's "real value" because of its rarity, and GamePro called it a substantial improvement on the original, while Allgame preferred Joust despite Joust 2's more detailed graphics and IGN's Craig Harris found it "slightly less imaginative".