Montezuma's Revenge is an early example of the Metroidvania genre. The player controls a character called Panama Joe, moving him from room to room in the labyrinthine underground pyramid of the 16th century Aztec temple of emperor Montezuma II, filled with enemies, obstacles, traps, and dangers. The objective is to score points by gathering jewels and killing enemies along the way. Panama Joe must find keys to open doors, collect and use equipment such as torches, swords, amulets, etc., and avoid or defeat the challenges in his path. Obstacles are laser gates, conveyor belts, disappearing floors and fire pits. Movement is achieved by jumping, running, sliding down poles, and climbing chains and ladders. Enemies are skulls, snakes, and spiders. The player has a limited number of inventory slots for carrying items, and cannot collect any other items or jewels if all slots are filled. A further complication arises in the bottom-most floors of each pyramid, which must be played in total darkness unless a torch is found. The pyramid is nine floors deep, not counting the topmost entry room that the player drops into at the start of each level, and has 99 rooms to explore. The goal is to reach the Treasure Chamber, whose entrance is in the center room of the lowest level. After jumping in here, the player has a short time to jump from one chain to another and pick up as many jewels as possible. However, jumping onto a fireman's pole will immediately take the player to the next level; when time runs out, the player is automatically thrown onto the pole. There are nine difficulty levels in all. Though the basic layout of the pyramid remains the same from one level to the next, small changes in details force the player to rethink strategy. These changes include:
Blocking or opening up certain paths
Adding enemies and obstacles
Rearrangement of items
More dark rooms and fewer torches
Enemies that do not disappear after they kill Panama Joe
The player can reach only the left half of the pyramid in level 1, and only the right half in level 2. Starting with level 3, the entire pyramid is open for exploration. The sound track of the game for the Atari 8 bit computer is a musical adaptation of Spanish Flea and the first few notes of La Cucaracha when collecting items.
Development
Robert Jaeger had previously written Chomper and Pinhead. In 1983, Jaeger's friend Mark Sunshine suggested Jaeger make a game with a Meso-American theme and call it Montezuma's Revenge. Jaeger, who was only 16 at the time, exhibited the still-unfinished game with his father at a consumer electronics convention. Parker Brothers officials expressed interest and quickly convinced Jaeger to sign the rights over to them. On the title screen of the shipping game, Mark Sunshine is credited for the concept. The original game that Jaeger developed for the Atari 800 used the entire 48K of memory in the computer. However, Parker Brothers wanted to release the game on cartridge as this format would be easier for children to handle than magnetic media, so they trimmed the game down to fit in 16K. The original disk version contains many features omitted from the smaller cartridge versions, including an animated title and character introduction, replacement and bonus life animations, a high-score entry screen, and a bat obstacle. The played character also features a different hat and is named Pedro rather than Panama Joe. This version contains an unfinished boss screen featuring a gigantic King Montezuma who can stomp the player character to death. This screen is unfinished, and therefore the original version of the game cannot be completed. Parker Brothers released console versions for the Colecovision, Atari 2600, and Atari 5200, and computer versions for the Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and Atari 8-bit family. The North American video game crash of 1983 caused Parker Brothers's video game sales to plummet, so to reduce costs they released the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit versions on disk instead of the intended cartridges and also put two versions of the game on one floppy. The computer versions of Montezuma's Revenge thus came on "flippy" disks with the Commodore and Atari ports piggybacked and likewise for the Apple and IBM versions. The IBM port uses a CPU-based speed loop and thus will run too fast to be playable on 286 and up machines. A cassette tape version was developed separately in the UK for the Sinclair Spectrum. The Atari 2600 cartridge is 8K and has half the levels of the other versions.
Legacy
In 1988, a port was published for the Master System, which retains the basic gameplay and level structure, but with improved graphics, sound, and additional features. This version was outsourced to Micro Smiths, a company led by Mark Lesser who previously worked for Parker Bros. on . In 1998 a 3D first-person game was developed for Microsoft Windows by Utopia Technologies called Montezuma's Return! A 2D version of that game for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color was developed by Tarantula Studios. Atari 2600 games became challenges for Artificial intelligence researchers. In 2013, progress was made on general algorithms which could learn to play multiple games, but they failed on Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall!. In 2018, researchers from OpenAI made progress on Montezuma's Revenge. Later in the year Uber developed Go-Explore, a new approach to reinforcement learning, which could easily handle both of these games.
