for several seconds. Upon taking damage, the player phases through the platforms they are on for several seconds, causing the player to lose progress. There are checkpoints in each level that, upon being reached, the player cannot fall through. Blue flowers in levels may be turned into moving platforms by shooting them. As a copy-protection measure, the player is prompted to enter a word from a specific page and line in the manual upon starting the game. Development Many of Top Banana's sprites are taken from videos and television for use in the game, much in the same way audio may be sampled in music. Musician and Coldcut member Matt Black worked on Top Banana, and later members of the Hex multimedia group formed Hexstatic. Top Banana was playtested in the Netherlands. Top Banana cost 329 Swedish Kronor in 1992. Top Banana's developer & publisher Hex is also known as Hardwire, a company specializing in computer graphics work for music videos. Hex spokesman Robert Pepperell stated in an article in a May 1991 issue of The One that Top Banana was developed because Hex believed "a computer game would be an interesting challenge", and because "Most games look rather sterile. We wanted to do something really different and positive. The technique of video sampling has never been used in a game before. Top Banana really looks and sounds completely different to any other computer game yet written." Matt Black was initially going to make a cameo appearance in Top Banana as a manic bongo player, but this is absent in the final game. The screenshot of Top Banana featured in The One's article is drastically visually different to that of the final game, with a differing artstyle, a top-down perspective as opposed to a 2D one, and depicts a performance hall with a piano, a location absent in the final game. Reception Several reviewers compare Top Banana to Rainbow Islands and criticize Top Banana's graphics. The Atari ST version of Top Banana is featured in Stuart Ashen's (also known by his online presence as Ashens) 2017 book Attack of the Flickering Skeletons: More Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of, particularly criticizing Top Banana's graphics, calling them "an utterly indecipherable, garbled mess" and that "the only reason you can actually pick out the enemies from the rest of the screen is because they move ... each area gets progressively