Jump Bug
Jump Bug is a 1981 arcade game created by Alpha Denshi for Hoei Corporation. Sega published it in Japan and Europe, and Rock-Ola released it in North America. It was later ported to Arcadia 2001, Leisure Vision, and PC-98.
You control a bouncing Volkswagen-style car in a side-scrolling world that automatically moves to the right. You can shoot enemies and land on treasure bags to destroy them and collect treasure. Each treasure fills a meter, and the first time the meter fills you earn an extra life. You score points for treasure, enemies, and even jumping on clouds.
The game features several connected areas: a city, a mountain range, a large pyramid, and an underwater path where you move slowly. In the pyramid, the screen also scrolls vertically in a coarser way, and you can move in any direction to find the exit. The rest scrolls horizontally, with a simple parallax effect of a moving scene against a mostly fixed night sky and drifting clouds.
Jump Bug is one of the first forced-scrolling horizontal shooters and the first platformer to mix horizontal scrolling with a vertical scrolling section. It came out before Moon Patrol and helped shape early arcade games. In Japan, it was among the 1981 top earners, tied for 14th place.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:51 (CET).