Disco Dan
Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Released - 1984
Disco Dan may sound like a progenitor of Dance Dance Revolution but is far from it. As the game starts out on the Tatung Einstein, you fly your spaceship through an asteroid belt in chase-view 3D (of the old sprite-scaling kind). Hitting an asteroid wears down your shield, indicated by the colour of your vessel. On the ZX Spectrum, you first have to run down a corridor viewed from behind Dan running into the screen. Here you have to avoid lines of lasers or creatures by jumping them to reach the core of the reactor.
Upon arrival at one of many nuclear reactors on the brink of meltdown, you don your radioactivity-resistant spacesuit and enter the core, which is made up of a screenful of colourful discs, to manually shut it down. You do so by jumping from disc to disc, much like in Q*Bert, and this is what has given the game its name. The reactors are guarded by one or several small robots, though, as well as stray atoms. These will raise the count of any disc they occupy (six is close to meltdown), so that Dan must jump back across that disc. Using his gun, Dan can chase away the robots, but never destroy them.
The control method in the reactor part is not the usual "pull in the direction you want to jump" method; instead, you rotate Dan in the orientation you want, and push up on the joystick to jump.
