Atari to deliver retro-pop with Mr. Run and Jump this year

Dash and leap

Atari is showing off their upcoming platformer, Mr. Run and Jump, which is set to launch this year on PC and consoles.

Mr. Run and Jump allegedly started its life as a homebrew experiment for the Atari 2600 at Graphite Lab, a frequent partner of Atari’s. Afterwards, the publisher liked what they saw and commissioned a more modernized take on it. It appears to be a fast-paced, die-and-retry platformer with neon visuals. In other words, its name does a pretty good job of summing it up! There is definitely some running and jumping going on here. Perhaps even some hopping, but no bopping. Bopping looks fatal.

I’ll be honest here, I’d be more interested in seeing the homebrew original in action. That’s not a sleight against Mr. Run and Jump, I guess I just think that a game made in the constraints of an old console is more fascinating than a 2D platformer made on modern hardware. I’m also not a huge fan of the die-and-retry genre, and that includes classic examples such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy. Just not my jam.

That said, I dig the style on display here. The neon visuals fit in with what Atari seems to have been going for recently, which is sort of a modernized re-interpretation of what could be pushed in the primordial days of consoles. It also looks to be in a similar vein as Graphite Labs’ previous game, Kombinera. I never played it, but it was very well-received.

Mr. Run and Jump is looking to drop this year on PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Atari VCS (the modern one).