When you think of parkour in video games you probably think about Assassin's Creed,
Mirrors Edge or Dying Light, but has it ever occurred to you that
This guy has been doing parkour before all of them?
ever since Donkey Kong released in 1981 and was the first game
ever to feature the ability to jump, Parkour has been a part of video gaming.
In recent years, as players expect more and more freedom in video games
Parkour mechanics and movements are becoming more common.
But how did we get here?
How did a single jump turn into these complicated movement systems,
that power the games we play today.
In this video we're going to find out, so grab a drink, settle in
and together we're going to explore
the evolution of parkour in video games
Let's get into it!
So it all kicked off in the 80s with Super Mario Brothers in 1985 and more importantly
Prince of Persia in 1989. Both of these games use a 2D perspective where your goal is to
cross the screen from left to right using jumps and in the case of Prince of Persia
climbing as well.
Prince of Persia actually copied real-life footage to exactly mirror
a human being jumping. This was one of the first ever examples of a process that would
eventually turn into motion capture, which is how most animation these days is done in
video games.
Now over the following 10 years since Prince of Persia came out we did see
new additions to Parkour systems in 2D side scrollers.
One of the best early examples was
Aladdin on the Super Nintendo which elevated the Prince of Persia formula by allowing Aladdin
to swing from pole to pole, and further games that iterated on horizontal and especially
vertical movement, were things like Mega Man X and Super Metroid which invented the idea
of bouncing off of a wall, but fundamentally all these games were still limited to vertical
or horizontal movement.
However it wasn't until the summer of 1996 when the original jumpman
Super Mario, turned the industry on his head once again with the release of Super Mario 64.
With the addition of the third dimension, suddenly expansive environments opened up
with the ability to climb trees, jump off walls
and an assortment of acrobatic flips you could have Mario do.
Having the ability to explore an open environment with your movements, changed
the way you could play the game.
This would further be developed by the release of Tomb Raider
which took the Prince of Persia formula and added its own blend of exploration and
gun-play to make it more of an action platformer.
In comparison to Mario 64 however, this game
would have a much more linear route that you had to navigate.
Now as the 64-bit era progressed
we saw a number of other platform games emerge such as Crash Bandicoot or Banjo-Kazooie.
These early games were still guessing at what
a movement system such as Parkour would be like
and were mostly based upon gymnastics or martial arts,
and that's because in 2000, Parkour as we knew it barely existed.
While stealth genre pioneer Splinter Cell was experimenting
with shimming along pipes or kicking off of a wall to gain height when climbing,
it still isn't what we really think of as Parkour.
However in 2003 Parkour was truly exposed to the world
with a groundbreaking documentary, Jump London, and a couple of months later it was followed
by the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Not only did Prince of Persia revolutionize the way that Parkour movement systems were
implemented at that point, it also had this great feature where the player could press
a button to rewind time and retry a difficult section without having to start from the beginning.
There are some movements in Prince of Persia that have even influenced Parkour in real
life such, as this wall bounce in Australia.
Prince of Persia also really developed and introduced the idea of shimmying
and climbing up and down ledges, which was later improved
upon with Mark Eko's Getting Up.
It's almost like a predecessor to the modern
descent type movements that we see today.
Around this time freerunning had pretty much hit the mainstream and although it had appeared
in Tony Hawk's Underground, it wasn't until Tony Hawk's American wasteland, where Parkour
or Free Running actually got a proper name check.
"Bonjour!"
"In France we don't need boards with wheels to do tricks, we do the Parkour!"
"What's flippin Parkour?!"
Again though, these systems really served as a means to an end
a way to get the player from A to B to better serve other gameplay mechanics or the story.
The progression of Parkour carried through 2007
where global interest was at an all-time high.
Parkour got its own video game called 'Free Running' on the Playstation 2.
This game was actually developed hand-in-hand with Urban Free Flow,
at the time the biggest Parkour team in the world and effectively it mimicked
the idea of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Where you would do various movements and tricks around
an environment and score points, but while it had some kind of true Parkour representation
for example Sebastien Foucan, one of the founders of Parkour and Freerunning is in the game,
although with a different voice,
"Hey there my name is Sebastien Foucan"
and they do have some correct movement names, this game didn't
really give the player a feeling of the true freedom that Parkour promises.
It was a little bit stiff, the controls weren't great and
ultimately it was a bit of a flop.
It wasn't until winter that year when we really got a taste
of what kind of freedom Parkour could give you in a video game.
In the winter of 2007 Assassins Creed released.
This game completely revolutionized what it meant to be able to
jump and climb around the game world, where for the first time you could run up to any
building, climb the ledges and the outcrops from the side and then jump and stride from
roof to roof in a fully open environment.
Assassin's Creed took a fundamentally different approach
to movement than games before it.
In Assassin's Creed it would contextually work out what
you wanted to do depending on where you were trying to move your character.
If you move towards the wall you'll climb it.
If you jump to a ledge, you'll stride it.
If you jump to a bar, you'll lache.
In effect the game was interpreting your intention and applying Parkour
to that, instead of you actually having to press the buttons for exactly what you wanted.
The striding motion in Assassin's Creed was especially influential.
Parkour genuinely followed
the example of the assassin striding across beams and poles, and this striding type of
movement suddenly came to the forefront of the scene with the Hayward strides in London
unofficially being known as the 'Assassins Creed strides' at the time.
And you can watch our video 'On Ascent 2'
to see what Assassin's Creed climbing might look like in real life.
But although Assassin's Creed did change the game by giving the player the freedom to go
where they wanted, it wasn't until the next year that players would get a game that gave
them the feeling of truly doing parkour for themselves.
And that game was Mirror's Edge.
Mirror's Edge built its entire focus around fluid gameplay,
clean visuals that still hold up all these years later,
and giving the player tools to navigate the world in
the most Parkour accurate way yet.
A project that would split the tree of Parkour video gaming away from
third person in a 2D or 3D world, and instead put you directly inside
the eyes of the person doing the movement.
Unlike most games, Mirror's Edge put your jumping and crouching and climbing
buttons on the control triggers, allowing you
to keep your thumbs free for the analog sticks.
It works so well because as a player you had to be mechanically good at the game
and creative with your route planning, to get the most out of the system.
And what made Mirror's Edge different from all the Parkour games before it
was that you actually got to feel like someone doing Parkour for yourself,
and the rules for first-person Parkour gameplay that Mirror's Edge laid out
have been followed by basically every game since.
One of our very first Parkour POV videos
was a Mirror's edge tribute and we bought a red glove
from Amazon and filmed Parkour through the city.
And that actually leads me on to my first ever professional Parkour job which
was a three week tour filming Parkour around Europe to promote the video game 'Brink'.
Brink was a competitive multiplayer FPS game where
teams of eight would fight over objectives
much like Call of Duty or Team Fortress 2, however in Brink, Parkour was a key element
allowing players to traverse the maps and gunfights in ways not done before.
While ultimately Brink ended up being a bit of a disappointment,
the ideas it did have ultimately ended up playing out in a much more successful game series,
Titanfall, which released in 2014.
In Titanfall, wall running and climbing would turn out to be key gameplay elements and the
fluid movement would allow players to approach gunfights in new ways.
In 2015 there was a big evolution in first person
parkour games, but before we get to that, let's catch up on
what was happening in the third person space in the same time period.
We saw the follow-up to Assassin's Creed
with numerous sequels, following the story of Ezio Auditore through
Italy, then on to Assassin's Creed 3 in 2012, which had some really cool developments by
allowing the player to do Parkour through trees for the first time,
and it actually looked really good in motion.
2012 was also a big year for mobile gamers when the 2D side-scroller Vector released.
With some of the most in-depth and fluid platforming featuring Parkour movements,
Vector played more like a rhythm action game, with the player swiping on the screen to time
the inputs; but the actual level design and animation, and the amount of
Parkour movements in that game were amazing.
There was also another massive thing that happened in 2012,
but I'm going to address that later as well.
The following years were peppered with pseudo-parkour games including
The Tomb Raider reboots.
Watchdogs, which brought the Assassin's Creed formula to modern urban environments.
The Uncharted series.
Sleeping Dogs which featured its own Parkour training mission.
"Free running?"
Nintendogs
Wait no not that one!
And finally Assassin's Creed Unity, which totally redeveloped the
movement system, which still looks awesome even to this day.
Focusing on the ability for the player to ascend and descend buildings
in broader ways than just jumping into a cart of hay.
Now modern Assassin's Creed games have
kind of stepped away from the parkour a little bit.
With Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla being
set so far in the past, that a majority of Parkour suitable architecture
hadn't actually been built yet.
But Unity still holds up to this day as having a beautiful fluid movement
system, really clever stuff.
So we've caught back up to 2015 where we were blessed with
one of the funniest Parkour lines in a video game...
"I'm a goddamn Parkour instructor!"
The release of zombie action banger Dying Light empowered the player with
a revised movement system much like Mirror's Edge but better mixed it
with hand-to-hand combat and an open world to explore.
We actually made a promotional POV video for Dying Light on this channel
Which turned out to be really popular and kicked off an entire sub-series of zombie videos for us.
Now the cool thing about Dying Light was that the parkour systems clicked so well
with the zombie gameplay. Jumping from building to building and then drop kicking a
zombie off the edge felt so satisfying and unlike mirror's edge, which is mostly focused on
reaching locations and objectives and generally avoids combat, Dying Light is pure
escape and survival. The thrill of being out in a city at night with super-powered zombies
who want to munch on you, and all you can do is run away for your life
is a gameplay experience that stuck with many.
Now the following year saw a reboot of Mirror's Edge with an open world
take on the franchise and a revised movement system, though somewhat simplified.
Which I think turned off a lot of fans from the original.
We had a couple of other noteworthy Parkour inspired first person games in recent years
such as Downward, Hot Lava and Ghost Runner
and Parkour elements popping up across many genres from stealth games like Dishonored
to Call of Duty, where players can now jump and climb into windows to surprise enemy squads.
But the most interesting experience that would really give the player a
feeling of doing parkour themselves was about to release
and that game is called Stride
played using a VR headset, Stride has you
physically moving your hands to run and jump as you move through
a Mirror's Edge inspired world. Jumping over rooftops and shooting enemies.
It's Mirror's Edge but VR
Here's what i look like playing it!
Now the cool thing about stride though, is that you actually get the sensation of doing the jumps
vaulting over objects and using a grappling hook for yourself
when you fall from a building it really feels like you're falling
Whoa that was cool!
All right! I'm going to go off here,
I'm gonna wall-run this wall, land on that, wall run that wall. OK Ready?
Land on here. Wall run this wall. Nice!
Ooo do we get the armjump? Yes we do. Clean!
It is a crazy experience and it's not like anything else i've ever played
and i've actually been talking to the developers of this game and they've got some
big and exciting plans for a story mode that's coming out in the future soon.
Lets goooo!
However while all this evolution was happening with parkour movement systems slowly becoming
more and more integrated into the big blockbuster games, there was a quiet revolution happening
in the land of user-generated content in a game that nobody at all expected.
Minecraft!
Since 2012 Minecraft players have been making their own Minecraft Parkour maps
bending the gameplay mechanics to create some fascinating traversal challenges.
Another game, Overwatch features user made maps and modes
where the heroes have to navigate challenging A to B courses
and there's also Grand Theft Auto with his own Parkour style movements and especially
on PC people have done some insane parkour mods for GTA San Andreas where they even built
a virtual version of a Red Bull Art of Motion Parkour competition course to play on but
there is one user-generated game that has one of the most deep and impressive Parkour
implementations yet. Now 'Dreams' is a Playstation game where you build games, it's not exactly
coding but it's deep enough that you can create some really advanced stuff within the engine.
And this game inside Dreams is called 'True PKFR'
the creator of this game within a game Henry Blue is a parkour practitioner himself
and he has spent hundreds of hours tweaking and changing the movement mechanics
to try and replicate the feeling of Parkour as much as possible
in fact there was a move done in this game first that was then done in real life
at the Imax spot by Dom Tomato
The movement system in dreams is physics based a bit like Skater XL
instead of being animation based
and this means that you can kind of do anything the engine will allow as long as it's set up
and it's amazing to see how one person made this
entire minigame all on their own.
Now looking to the future Storror have announced their own official Parkour
game called Storror Parkour Pro. There's only been a trailer released publicly
and we haven't seen any gameplay footage, however we have seen epic looking environments
including the world famous IMAX spot in London, and the areas around it like
the London Eye, which almost hints that all
of Southbank could be playable in the final game.
"Yo so we're here at IMAX filming this video."
"Lets go Josh! Come on, you got that Dash!"
The project is still in deep development, with an eventual summer 2022 release window
and we've only seen tiny little glimpses during developer blogs
as to how the game could play. From what's been put out
their intentions are to follow the model of True PKFR and Skater XL
where you'll be in open play spaces with control schemes that are tricky to learn but reward
technical mastery just like real parkour itself. In the blockbuster gaming space we have the
upcoming release of Dying Light 2 which looks to further iterate on the first person Parkour
experience with twice as many Parkour movements as the first game
now while almost every parkour game uses the movement as a
form of transport, only True PKFR on Dreams, 2007's Freerunning
and the upcoming Storror game are actually focusing on the parkour itself. Personally I think that
Assassin's Creed unity still has the best Parkour movement system but it's going to
be really interesting to see how future Parkour games develop and iterate on this
with machine learning, better animation systems allowing
greater interaction between the player character and the environments.
It's astonishing to see how much True PKFR has been able to capture
but you can still feel while playing the game the physics of Parkour have been bent a little
bit to allow the gameplay to work. You can see this bending of physics across almost
all Parkour games. I think in the future it's going to be fascinating to see how well gameplay
developers can actually let the parkour athlete interact with an environment
in such a tactile and detailed way as real Parkour.
Which of these games has the best parkour in? let me know in the comments!
Don't forget to subscribe and i'll see you in the next one.
We're done. We're done!