Platform: Game Boy
Developer: Infogrames
Release: 1991

When I first heard the name of this game, I thought it involved making virtual pop-up books. While I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that appeared on the 3DS in the near future, this game was nothing like that. It was a puzzle game where you play as a time-traveling ball. Why is it traveling through time? Apparently, it’s trying to get home, because the game ends with the ball entering its ‘house’ and banging against… sorry, making innocent contact with a blob who has ears or wings or something. And hearts appear. Awwwwwww…

Let’s go back to the beginning. This is a puzzle game where you play as a ball who bounces on platforms and collects random items to make an exit appear. Reach the exit and you move on to the next stage. This goes on for 100 levels, to the tune of one surprisingly catchy song, with a difficulty curve that bounces around as erratically as the main character. Heck, one of the last ten stages is nothing but angled platforms, so unless you self-destruct it is absolutely impossible to fail it!

Oh right, there’s different platforms to make the experience varied and challenging. There are angled platforms that bounce you in a certain direction, platforms that shrink every time you bounce on them, sticky platforms that you can’t bounce on, spiky platforms that kill you, and various other wonders. Also, there are walls that can be destroyed if you collect enough keys, fires that can be put out by collecting water droplets, and brick walls that require hammers to destroy.

And that time-traveling element I mentioned before? Just an aesthetic thing. The background changes from the Big Bang, cavemen, a medieval castle, the Statue of Liberty, and… back to the Big Bang again. The items and enemies have been designed to match the time period (most of the time), so while you may be collecting moons and dodging asteroids on the Big Bang stage, you’ll be collecting stuff like computers and dodging cars on the Statue of Liberty stage. Also, the keys and hammers change with the time period, so while modern hammers look just as you’d expect, the stone age ones look like ancient tomahawks. Clever!

But then, the whole game is clever. It’s a puzzle game that is simple to learn and difficult to master, full of variety and (mostly) excellent level design. With the recent explosion of wacky platform/puzzle games available on digital distribution services nowadays, Pop Up is just begging for a remake. How about improved graphics, more time periods, and maybe a different remix of the song for each period? Infogrames are still in business (albeit under a different name), so why they wouldn’t exploit this brilliant game is anyone’s guess.

While researching this article, I discovered that Pop Up is so obscure that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. It does, however, have a free online version which you can play here. It’s a Java version of the game, but it retains all the original graphics and physics. Just remember that Z makes you jump really high, X does the same, and pressing both keys at once makes you self-destruct!