Sky Skipper

In Sky Skipper, the player pilots a biplane through scrolling mazes to save animals caged by enemy gorillas. The player must drop bombs onto the gorillas which will temporarily knock them out and unlock the cages. Then, the player must swoop down to pick up the animals before the gorillas get up and lock the cages again. Flying into a gorilla or wall destroys the plane, resulting in the loss of one life.

The plane's fuel gauge goes down while flying, and is replenished by picking up the animals. There are four stages in total, which are repeated on increased difficulty.

In 1981, Nintendo developed and released Sky Skipper in Japan; the game was produced alongside Nintendo's highly successful Donkey Kong arcade game, with both titles releasing in July of the same year. It was designed by Genyo Takeda and Shigeru Miyamoto with assistance from the company Ikegami Tsushinki, a company that helped Nintendo program many of their early arcade games. The cabinets were produced in upright, cabaret, and cocktail variations with cabinet artwork done by Miyamoto. The game performed poorly in test markets in Japan and was not widely released there.

Around a dozen cabinets were sent to Nintendo of America in Redmond, Washington for location tests, but the game was poorly received there, too, and was never widely released in America. Because of the poor reception, Nintendo converted the Sky Skipper cabinets into Popeye, released in 1982. One of the ten North American cabinets escaped this fate and was put in storage at Nintendo of America.

Reviewing the Switch release, both Nintendo World Report and Nintendo Life said the game was enjoyable when playing for a high score, but it lacked variety. Nintendo Life enjoyed "striking a balance between completing the levels quickly and plotting a route to maximise your point-scoring." Nintendo World Report did not like how the game repeated the same few stages and felt as though the game was not finished. They also panned the stage graphics, calling them "extremely crude" compared to Donkey Kong.

Nintendo Life agreed in that the colors were garish in places and the environments were blocky, writing this: "The simple design and plain backgrounds ensure everything is easy to follow, but Sky Skipper certainly shows its age." Both praised the extra options included with the Arcade Archives release.