Keystone Kapers

Keystone Kapers is about police officer Keystone Kelly trying to capture the con-artist and thief Harry Hooligan who is at large in Southwick's Emporium. The game involves the player controlling Kelly, moving him left and right and having him jump and duck to avoid objects such as shopping carts, beach balls and toy biplanes. The player's goal is to apprehend Harry, who can be tracked on a mini-map at the bottom of the screen where Kelly is the black dot and Harry is the white dot. Kelly can maneuver himself between the floors of the building between elevators and the escalator.

The game ends when the player runs out of lives: lives are lost when running out of time, colliding with a biplane, or allowing Harry escape to the roof of the building. Points are rewarded when apprehending Harry, for the amount of time left when apprehending Harry, and collecting items left around the mansion such as moneybags and suitcases. Extra lives can be earned for every 10,000 points.

Keystone Kapers was the third Atari 2600 game developed by Garry Kitchen following his games Space Jockey and a port of Donkey Kong. Following completing work on Donkey Kong in May 1982, Kitchen joined Activision in June. Kitchen flew out to meet with the Activision team. Activision founder David Crane said that he knew the company had to grow but that having more people together would have made things worse so having the other office far away was ideal. Kitchen worked at Activision from a satellite design office in Glen Rock, New Jersey.

Kitchen spoke of the situation later, saying the he found the other Crane's group "preferred the idea of spawning another creative office to minimise the chance of screwing up the group synergy of Activision’s original creative team."

From contemporary reviews of the Atari 2600 version, reviewers such as Perry Greenberg in Video Games and Jim Clarke of Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated praised the games graphics. Clarke specifically described them as "brilliant", noting the swinging legs and arms of characters which were "an absolute delight, the best videogame character we've had since the Mad Bomber of Kaboom!." Critics had varied comments on the gameplay. While a review in Electronic Games said the game was "highly recommended", finding the game original, compulsively playable and was "truly vintage Activision, and that's saying something special." The Video Game Update found that early levels were easy, that later levels adding more obstacles adding strategic possibilities and depth, declaring the game "a thoroughly charming and whimsical game with great animation".

Clarke commented on the gameplay being similar to that of Donkey Kong and Pitfall! and while it was a less innovative game than Activision's Dolphin (1983), it was infinitely more exciting. Michael Blanchet echoed the comparisons in his review in Electronic Fun with Computers and Games, saying it resembled Donkey Kong but offers enough graphic and strategic differences to be called an original game. Blanchet also praised the ability to capture the criminal, stating that "instead of fleeing to another structure, the crook surrenders when caught.

Garry's brother Dan Kitchen planned to follow-up his first Atari 2600 game Crackpots with a sequel to Keystone Kapers in a Western setting. In 2018, Dan found the only surviving copy of the unfinished game in a storage unit and planned to release it under the title Gold Rush. It was released as Casey's Gold by Audacity Games in November 2024.

Kitchen followed up Keystone Kapers with Pressure Cooker for Activision for the Atari 2600, and would continue do develop programs for home computers such as Garry Kitchen's GameMaker and consoles such as A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia (1989) for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Reflecting on the game, Garry Kitchen said that felt the game had aged well and "from a graphics standpoint, I certainly spent a lot of time on the look of the game, and I hope it paid off. Obviously, I also put in a great deal of effort tweaking the playability [...] I'm sure that, without that time and effort, the game would not have the staying power that it does."