genre,' which includes Apple Panic and Donkey Kong." That label was also used by Video Games Player magazine in 1983 when it named the Coleco port of Donkey Kong "Ladder Game of the Year". Another term used in the late 1980s to 1990s was "character action games", in reference to games such as Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, and Bubsy. It was also applied more generally to side-scrolling video games, including run and gun video games such as Gunstar Heroes. Platform game became a standard term in the late 1980s, popularized by its usage in the United Kingdom press. By 1989, British magazines were using the term "platform" games to refer to the genre; examples include referring to the "Super Mario mould" (such as Kato-chan & Ken-chan) as platform games, or calling Strider a "platform and ladders" game. History Single-screen movement Platform games originated in the early 1980s. Most early examples of platform games were confined to a static playing field, generally viewed in profile, and were based on climbing mechanics between platforms rather than jumping. Space Panic, a 1980 arcade release by Universal, is sometimes credited as the first platform game. Another precursor to the genre from 1980 was Nichibutsu's Crazy Climber, in which the player character scales vertically scrolling skyscrapers. The unreleased 1979 Intellivision game Hard Hat has a similar concept. Donkey Kong, an arcade game created by Nintendo and released in July 1981, was the first game to allow players to jump over obstacles and gaps. It is widely considered to be the first platform game. It introduced Mario under the name Jumpman. Donkey Kong was ported to many consoles and computers at the time, notably as the system-selling pack-in game for ColecoVision, and also a handheld version from Coleco in 1982. The game helped cement Nintendo's position as an important name in the video game industry internationally. The following year, Donkey Kong received a sequel, Donkey Kong Jr. and later Mario Bros., a platform game with two-player cooperative play. It laid the groundwork for other two-player cooperative platformers such as Fairyland Story and Bubble Bobble. Beginning in 1982, transitional games emerged that did not use scrolling graphics, but had levels that span several connected screens. David Crane's Pitfall! for the Atari 2600, with 256 horizontally connected screens, became one of the best-selling games on the system and was a breakthrough for the genre. Smurf: Rescue