Keystone Kapers

1983 · Platform · Atari 2600

About Keystone Kapers

Keystone Kapers (1983) is Garry Kitchen's Activision platformer for the Atari 2600 in which Keystone Kelly chases the thief Harry Hooligan through a four-floor department store, dodging shopping carts, beach balls and toy biplanes.

Keystone Kapers in Depth

Officer Keystone Kelly must catch the con artist Harry Hooligan, on the loose in Southwick's Emporium. The player moves Kelly left and right, jumping and ducking to avoid shopping carts, beach balls and toy biplanes, and rides the lifts and escalator between floors. A mini-map at the bottom of the screen shows Kelly as a black dot and Harry as a white one. Lives are lost by running out of time, colliding with a biplane or letting Harry escape to the roof. Catching him scores points, plus a bonus for the time left, and moneybags and suitcases lying around the store add more; an extra life comes every 10,000 points.

Kitchen began with a vertically scrolling design like Donkey Kong, with the cop climbing the building floor by floor after the crook, and had it presentable within a month. When he showed it to David Crane, Crane suggested making it extend horizontally like his Pitfall!, then in progress. Kitchen kept Donkey Kong's idea of objects thrown to slow the chase and borrowed the mini-map from Bob Whitehead's Chopper Command.

Making Keystone Kapers

It was Kitchen's third 2600 game after Space Jockey and a Donkey Kong port. He joined Activision in June 1982 and worked from a satellite office in Glen Rock, New Jersey, which Crane felt would protect the original team's chemistry; Kitchen described himself as still in "little man mode" after Donkey Kong. Code was written on a PDP-11 minicomputer, and the game had to fit 4 KB for financial reasons. Activision released it in May 1983, followed by ColecoVision and Atari 5200 versions, the latter adding music and a level select. Critics praised its graphics, Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated calling Kelly's swinging arms and legs "an absolute delight", and Electronic Games called it "truly vintage Activision". It won a Certificate of Merit at the 1984 Arkie Awards. Allgame later found it "solid, yet forgettable", but Retro Gamer ranked it 11th among Atari 2600 games in 2008.

Keystone Kapers Trivia

Its code name was Cop.
Kitchen said the Keystone Cops theme was his wife's idea, and their bowler hats, blue uniforms and billy clubs suited the 2600.
A Model T-like car outside the store was cut because it "cost too many bytes".
A television was removed as an anachronism.
A Western-themed sequel by his brother Dan, found in storage in 2018, was released as Casey's Gold in 2024.