Are there some old games that you just never really…”got?” I mean, for classic gamers, of course we can’t all be experts at every single game (oh really? You’re a world champion at Donkey Kong and Tranquilizer Gun and Digger and The Glob and Night Striker? Yeah you’re not).

If we’re being honest, sometimes, for whatever reason, some games just don’t “click” with us. Maybe we didn’t get much opportunity to play them, maybe we just didn’t understand how to play them effectively because the rules and mechanics were too obtuse for whatever brand of neurodivergence we have. Could be any such scenario really.

As enthusiasts, we all want to be good at lots of games. Or, at least, understand them well enough to know whether or not they’re worth our time.

For me, that game was Crazy Climber.

I first heard of Crazy Climber in the 1981 book How To Master The Video Games by Tom Hirschfeld. This magickal paperback tome of arcade secrets came into my possession around age 7 or 8, and it was full of many of my favorite games, as well as games I had not seen at my local arcades or shopping centers.

As I studied this particular volume of arcade arcana, one game, unfamiliar to me, stood out more than the others: Crazy Climber.

Mostly I think I was intrigued by the funny-looking “King Kong” in the illustration, because even at that young age, I already loved King Kong and Donkey Kong, so I really wanted to know what this game with another giant gorilla at the top of a building was all about.

I read the description of the game’s two-joystick control scheme and found it very interesting. The writeup described Nichibutsu signs with sparking electric wires and Crazy Climber signs falling from the top. This game sounded cool!

As I mentioned, however, I never saw a Crazy Climber machine anywhere. Not at the three Pocket Change arcades in the local malls, not at the department stores and supermarkets in my home town or in the place where my family used to vacation every summer, not even at the arcade at Six Flags Great America amusement park in Illinois the few times I went there (and they had killer arcades in the ’80s).

I even remember seeing the ad for the Atari 2600 version, offered only by mail from the Atari Fan Club. None of my friends had that, either.

Even in the 1990s and 2000s, when my video gaming hobby became “retro” gaming, Crazy Climber remained this oddly elusive unicorn. I didn’t even know what the cabinet and marquee looked like until I saw it online. Once I did, though, and saw that awesome Taito marquee art (Taito licensed the game from Nichibutsu for US distribution) (side note: why was Taito’s marquee art SO GOOD in the ’80s?? Note to self: there’s a blog post or a ‘zine feature in there), I was even more obsessed with experiencing the game.

In the early 2000s, I saw the anime Arcade Gamer Fubuki, and in it, there is a scene involving a head-to-head Crazy Climber contest on a life-sized scale.

My first shot at CC finally happened via MAME emulation, but trying to learn the game with keyboard controls resulted in utter disaster. Still, I really wanted to figure it out. I knew that various home versions were available, such as the Famicom version or a few Nichibutsu compilations, but with Crazy Climber becoming a frustrating sticking point for me, I felt the only way to really get the full experience was going to be to find a real arcade machine.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not quite positive when the first time was that I finally DID encounter a Crazy Climber arcade cabinet. It could have been at Midwest Gaming Classic, when they had rooms packed full of arcade games. Or it could have been at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, because I’ve been there a few times and I know they have one. Was it when I visited ACAM/Funspot in Laconia? I can’t actually remember.

Regardless, I do know this: when I played it, I sucked at it.

Enter the Arcade Archives series. Available on most current platforms, there are hundreds of classic, arcade-perfect titles to choose from. Of course, Crazy Climber is one of them. Still determined to figure this game out, I picked it up for Nintendo Switch.

I continued to flounder. Look, the controls are a little frustrating. Your dude can easily get stuck with his arms in a weird position that he can’t seem to get out of, at which point he will inevitably get bonked on head with a flowerpot or have his hands slammed in a closing window, causing him to plummet to his death.

Small improvements in my gameplay occurred, as I carefully experimented with moving my character’s hands around. I learned that rhythmically moving both sticks in opposite up/down motions simultaneously resulted in a nice, fast climb, and that getting both hands planted and pushing both sticks in the same direction made him zip from side to side pretty quickly. But I still couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the various dangers falling my way.

At one point — actually when playing on a real machine at a barcade in Kansas City — I got lucky and reached the top of the first building for the first time ever. But I wasn’t even skilled enough to grab the helicopter and claim my bonus points.

Still, I kept trying and failing to really feel like I had control of the game. I had to be missing something.

Finally, unable to figure it out myself, I resorted to checking YouTube for some playthrough videos to see how it was done by people who actually knew what they were doing. And lo and behold, I finally had my A-HA! moment.

You can withstand most falling objects by holding both joysticks down, which holds your guy in an upward position, while being hit.

Click!

So simple. So dumb of me not to pick up on it. I had seen my guy get hit with items before and survive, but I didn’t really realize how it worked.

Armed with this knowledge, the game finally opened up to me. It only took a few games to start clearing at least the first building regularly, racking up higher scores, and feeling like I was in control. My first high score was in the 65,000 range, which put me at 2075th place on the worldwide leaderboard. Just a few games later, I scored over 146,000 points, shooting me up to 486th.

Not only that, once I got the hang of it, I learned that this game that used to frustrate me so much is FUN as HELL. It’s absolutely unique, your character’s animation is extremely detailed for its time, and it had some of the earliest voice samples in video games (“Ganbatte!” in the Japanese version and “Go for it!” in English, as well as various grunts and screams.). No wonder it was such a smash hit in Japan when it came out (according to Wikipedia, it was Japan’s third-highest-grossing arcade game in 1980, just behind Pac-Man and Galaga).

So instead of being obsessed with Crazy Climber because I couldn’t find it, now I’m obsessed with it because I love it. It’s so fun that I haven’t stopped playing it. I think about playing it and I crave it. I’m about to grab the 1988 sequel, Crazy Climber 2, next time I jump on the Nintendo e-Shop, and I wanna at least find some videos of the other sequels — the unreleased Crazy Climber ’85, and Hyper Crazy Climber and Crazy Climber 2000 for the PlayStations 1 and 2, respectively.

I wouldn’t even mind owning the original arcade machine. If I could find one, that is.

Now, watching videos of high-level, world-record gameplay, I do see that expert players actually do tend to avoid falling objects by being extremely skillful at performing fast and fluid movements with the climber.

The only solution to that is practice, of course, and I’m hoping to at least get to the point where I don’t have to rely on surviving repeated bonks to the head with flowerpots (after all, the faster you clear a building, the more bonus points you get).

So if there are any games you just can’t get, or that you’ve always wanted to be good at, all I can tell you is…GO FOR IT!