Top Banana

Top Banana is a game synthesised from everything that was hip, cool and "in" during the early nineties. With members from the experimental sampling music group Coldcut in the development team, it aimed to look no worse than a contemporary MTV video, with a cool rave intro, crazy "sampled" graphics composed of random imagery and lots of aaaciiiiiid. What it all boils down to is a very simple platform game with very advanced graphics. You control a girl in a rave outfit who jumps through a series of platform worlds where you throw some love around in the form of hearts, which somehow ties into an environmentally conscious (the packaging was made out of recycled paper) theme where the enemies are representatives of big business. Also, similar to Rainbow Islands, a mass of water is slowly rising from below, so you must hurry upwards through the level. The graphics make the game look not quite like anything else, as though the graphics artist just inverted all the tiles and put them in a random order. Keeping with the 90s sentiment of "information wants to be free", the samples and sprites are kept uncompressed on the disks, for everyone to edit according to their own tastes.