Mappy

Namco brought this game to the masses in 1983, a manic platformer starring a rodent police officer who's out to recover stolen merchandise from a gang of cats. The cat gang is known as Meowsky or "Naughty Folks", and their boss is "Boss the Big Bit" Goro (not to be confused with "Mortal Kombat" Goro). In Japan they call him Nyamco, as a pun on their own name.

Mappy travels through houses, using trampolines to traverse the floors and microwave doors to render his feline foes temporarily helpless, while picking up all the stolen loot in the house. Mappy has to retrieve paintings, televisions, computers, radios, and safes full of money from Goro and his gang. Bonus rounds consist of popping balloons through a hall of trampolines within the time limit.

The game was always more successful in Japan than in the US, mostly due to cultural differences and the ways arcades are run, since the US version of the machine (distributed by Bally/Midway) had an irregular design with its large marquee and left-right only joystick, and US arcade owners were/are more likely to modify existing machines, so they couldn't use Mappy's cabinet for much. In Japan though, the character has had success ever since the game first appeared, success that's only recently catching up in the states. There was a second game starring the character, entitled Hopping Mappy (only out in japan), and an NES-exclusive side scroller called Mappy Land, which was distributed in the states by Naxat-soft's US software arm, Taxan. Mappy's current endeavors include an enhanced version of the original game in the arcades as part of Namco Arcade Classics Vol. 1, and a cameo in Gun Balina (aka Point Blank 3) in the arcades and on the PSX.

Mappy itself has been ported to a number of consoles, including the NES, Game Gear (japan only), Windows (as part of the Microsoft package Revenge of Arcade), MSX, Sony Playstation (as part of Namco Museum vol. 4), and can also be played in emulators like MAME.

Xevious --- Pac & Pal