Arcade Archives: Sky Skipper

Sky Skipper is a 1981 action video game developed and published by Nintendo for arcades. The player pilots a biplane and must save animals and a royal family from gorillas holding them captured. This is done by dropping bombs on the gorillas to knock them out and unlock the cages, then diving down towards the cages to pick up the freed characters before the gorillas lock the cages again. The game was poorly received in location testing and was never widely released; despite this, an Atari 2600 port was released by Parker Brothers in 1983 in North America. The cabinets were converted into Popeye machines for release the following year.