Rick Dangerous: The Platformer That Killed You for Learning

Rick Dangerous opens with a plane crash and closes, a few screens later, with a hero flattened by a boulder he had no way of predicting the first time it rolled toward him. Core Design shipped the game in 1989 across the Amiga, the Atari ST, the C64 and the Amstrad CPC, and it wears its Indiana Jones influence so openly — the fedora, the whip-cracking swagger, a title screen practically lifted from the Spielberg poster — that Lucasfilm’s lawyers reportedly took an interest. What the design underneath actually resembles is less a swashbuckling adventure and more a piece of applied cruelty: a game built almost entirely from traps you cannot see coming the first time, arranged so that dying is not a failure state so much as the primary information-delivery mechanism. That resemblance to Indiana Jones was close enough, and lucrative enough in the imitation, that the borrowed iconography became as much a part of the game’s identity as anything Core Design invented from scratch, right down to a whip that functions less like a weapon and more like a key that only opens certain doors.

Death as the tutorial

Most platformers of the era telegraphed danger. A pit had visible depth, a spike had visible spikes, and a moving hazard usually gave you a beat to react once it entered the screen. Rick Dangerous largely refused this contract. A dart trap triggers from a floor tile identical to every other floor tile. A rolling boulder appears from off-screen with no warning animation. A pit opens beneath a walkway that looked entirely solid a moment earlier. The game’s difficulty doesn’t come from demanding fast reactions to visible threats — it comes from demanding that you have already died to this exact configuration once before, and remembered where.

This sounds, described flatly, like bad design, and a lot of contemporary criticism of trial-and-error platformers treats it exactly that way. But Rick Dangerous earns its structure through a genuinely clever concession: unlimited continues, an immediate restart at the exact point of death rather than a trip back to a distant checkpoint, and screens short enough that a memorised sequence takes seconds to execute once you know it. The game isn’t testing your reflexes against an unfair obstacle course. It’s testing your memory against a puzzle box disguised as a platformer, and it removes almost all the friction between a mistake and the next attempt to make that puzzle-solving loop bearable rather than punishing.

The screen as a solved puzzle, not a challenge

Once you understand that framing, Rick Dangerous becomes a genuinely different kind of game to play than it first appears. The player isn’t improving at jumping or shooting — the controls are simple enough that neither ever poses much of a challenge on their own. The player is building a map of hazards in their head, screen by screen, the way you’d memorise a security system’s blind spots rather than train to outrun its guards. Death isn’t a punishment for a skill failure. It’s a data point, delivered instantly and without ambiguity, about exactly where the next trap sits.

This design lineage runs directly through to the platformers that would later formalise “learn the level, die, try again” into an entire subgenre, and it’s worth tracing the honest ancestry rather than pretending Rick Dangerous invented the idea from nothing. Arcade games had used pattern memorisation for years before Core Design got to it — the trick here was porting that arcade sensibility, usually built around a coin-op’s need to consume quarters quickly, into a home-computer platformer with no coin slot demanding urgency, and finding that the memorisation loop worked even better once the pressure of a ticking credit counter was removed. You could take as long as you needed between attempts, which changed the psychology of failure from frustration into something closer to solving a riddle.

I remember the specific frustration of the whip mechanic on a first playthrough at thirteen, on a borrowed Amiga at a friend’s house rather than my own — Rick’s whip could clear certain enemies at range but couldn’t be aimed vertically, meaning several early screens looked solvable with the tool the game had just handed you and weren’t. That’s a design cruelty distinct from the trap memorisation, a kind of mechanical misdirection about your own toolkit rather than the environment, and it’s part of why the game earned its reputation for meanness beyond just the traps themselves. You had to learn where the danger was, and separately, which of your own abilities were quietly useless against it.

Presentation doing more than its budget suggests

Core Design, a young British studio at the time, gave Rick Dangerous a presentation far punchier than most trap-based platformers bothered with. The plane crash opening, the jungle temple’s collapsing statue heads, the sudden tonal shift into a dinosaur-infested cave system midway through — these sequences exist to sell the Indiana Jones fantasy the mechanics were quietly undermining at every turn. Rick himself dies in increasingly elaborate, almost slapstick ways — flattened, impaled, incinerated — and the game leans into the theatrical absurdity of it rather than treating each death soberly. That tonal choice matters more than it looks: a game this punishing needed permission to be funny about its own cruelty, or the trial-and-error structure would have curdled into simple frustration rather than dark comedy.

The soundtrack and sound design, modest by later standards, still manage a handful of memorable stings — the boulder’s rumble, the dart trap’s mechanical click — that function as auditory foreshadowing on a second playthrough even when the visual trigger remains invisible. It’s a small mercy the design offers once you’ve already died to a particular screen: the game starts giving you cues, just not the first time.

The port that mattered most

Across four wildly different pieces of hardware, the version most players actually experienced shaped how forgiving the memorisation loop felt in practice. The Amiga original ran at a smooth frame rate with generous colour and detailed backgrounds that made hazards, once learned, easier to spot on subsequent runs thanks to subtle visual tells the artists had space to include. The C64 conversion, squeezed onto far more limited hardware, stripped some of that visual nuance away, meaning several traps that gave a faint visual hint on Amiga offered almost none on Commodore’s machine — a harsher version of the same design by simple technical necessity rather than intent. The Atari ST version sat closest to the Amiga original, sharing much of its codebase, while the Amstrad CPC release, arriving later, compressed the presentation further still. None of the ports changed a single trap’s position or timing; they only changed how much the game was willing to tell you about a threat before it killed you the first time, which meant the “fairest” version of Rick Dangerous, if such a thing exists, was simply whichever computer a household happened to own.

The genre it actually belongs to

Rick Dangerous sits closer to a hidden-object puzzle than to Prince of Persia’s precision-platforming tradition, even though the two games shipped the same year and get filed under the same rough genre. Where Prince of Persia demanded exact timing executed correctly in the moment, Rick Dangerous demanded exact knowledge, acquired in advance through repeated failure, and executed almost mechanically once you had it. Both games are unforgiving; they’re unforgiving about entirely different things, and conflating them flattens what made each one distinct. The comparison also explains why Rick Dangerous aged into a slightly different kind of cult status — it’s remembered less for how it felt to play well and more for the specific, quotable ways it killed you, the same way people remember Ghosts ’n Goblins for its armour-stripping curse rather than its platforming feel, a design lineage covered in the piece on the C64 port of Ghosts ’n Goblins.

Spoilers below

The specific trap layout across Rick Dangerous’s temples and caves is the entire content of the game, so treat what follows as exactly the kind of information the design otherwise makes you earn through death. The rolling boulder on the second level’s exit corridor can only be survived by ducking into a side alcove that isn’t visible until you’re already being crushed the first time — there is no reaction-based dodge, only prior knowledge. The dinosaur cavern midway through the game introduces a pterodactyl that snatches Rick off narrow ledges from above, the only enemy in the game that attacks from outside the horizontal plane every other hazard occupies, and it demands a screen-specific route rather than a general strategy. The final confrontation, against a rival treasure hunter rather than any of the environmental traps that dominate the rest of the game, is comparatively generous — a straightforward shootout after four levels that offered none of that generosity, which reads as Core Design acknowledging that a player who survived the traps had earned an ending that tested something other than memory for once.

Core Design would go on to build Tomb Raider a few years later, and a surprising amount of Rick Dangerous’s trap-and-memorisation DNA survived that transition into three dimensions — Lara Croft’s tombs are full of the same unmarked pressure plates and collapsing floors, just rendered with enough visual language by that point to give a first-time player a fighting chance of spotting them. Rick Dangerous reads, in hindsight, like the studio working out the raw idea before they’d learned how to be fair about telegraphing it.

Revisited now, Rick Dangerous holds up as a genuinely honest piece of design once you stop expecting it to play fair in the way modern platformers train you to expect. It never claimed reflexes would save you, and the unlimited, frictionless retries are the game’s own admission that its traps are a puzzle rather than a test of skill. What to play next depends on which side of that design philosophy interests you more: for the memorisation-as-puzzle structure taken in a gentler, more forgiving direction, look at how the C64 conversion scene handled similarly unforgiving arcade ports; for the same era’s alternative bet on precise, learnable movement over hidden traps, Prince of Persia remains the clearest possible contrast, released the same year with an almost opposite theory of what a player deserves to see coming. Either way, the game is worth returning to on its own terms rather than through a modern lens that expects fairness as a baseline design promise rather than a negotiated one.