Backlog Game 007: Ape Escape

Main image source: www.wikipedia.org

Today, Ape Escape is regarded as a Playstation classic, but for me, the game is tied inextricably to another system closely associated with the year 1999.

I won’t give you three guesses, because in 1999, the Dreamcast loomed large, and Ape Escape was my way of basically killing time before my dad could bring a US Dreamcast back to Europe.

I don’t remember exactly what point I reached in Ape Escape, but it must have been relatively far because I definitely remember using the RC car, a gadget you don’t earn until quite late in the game.

I’m getting ahead of myself here, but on the topic of timing, once that Dreamcast was plugged in to my TV, that was the end of my time with Ape Escape, so the game is just as much part of my backlog as it is a loose end that I would wait almost a quarter-century to tie up!

I’ve got a couple of games in my backlog I really want to get started on (such as Sleeping Dogs and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus), but the thought of spending hours upon hours playing through them feels a little daunting given some other things I have going on now, so I was looking for something nice and easy to get back into things, and Ape Escape was constantly popping up to the top of my mental list (almost as if the Universe was telling me I had some unfinished business).

I own the NTSC version of this game, and hooking up an NTSC machine here in Europe is a little difficult. I could have bought the PAL version online for about 30 euros, but PAL PSX games are pretty sub-par in terms of game speed, so when I found I had the option of downloading a digital version on my PS4 for about 10 bucks, I jumped on it (I note this because the description of the game on the Playstation Store indicates some differences with the original and I don’t want to misrepresent your experience if you’re looking to play it on original hardware).

The original Ape Escape game was released in June 1999, to quite a bit of hype since it was the first game to fully utilize the Dualshock controller, which surprisingly was itself released quite a bit earlier, in 1997.

It’s worth spending some time discussing the Dualshock controller because it, unlike any other controller before or since, has pretty much been the foundation for every Playstation controller that followed. That has to imply the original designers were onto something, but to my feeble 13 year-old mind, I just saw this as an attempt to “catch up” to the N64 that came out in late 1996 and incorporated an analog stick (and rumble feedback, which appeared in early 1997 via the Rumble Pak utilized in Starfox 64).

In hindsight, the Dualshock is so much more than that because a) two sticks really are better than one, especially when the original Playstation controller design allows them to be placed neatly and accessibly in-line with each other and b) it is such a comfortable, functional object that the additions and tweaks really do add up to something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s no wonder that the design hasn’t changed that much since its release: setting aside “unconventional” functionalities such as those the Wii introduced, if you’re talking about a controller for videogames in the traditional sense, the Dualshock covers all the bases; if you took something away it would be worse off, but anything added would end up being redundant and overly complex.

Yet, as far as I know, other than some left analog stick support to control movement, it wasn’t until Ape Esape came along that developers really showed off what the Dualshock could do. Essentially, you walk and run with the left stick, while the right stick controls the various gadgets that you’ll acquire and use to solve puzzles, and you get rumble feedback depending on the actions you’re taking at a given time. The only slightly disorienting aspect of Ape Escape’s controls is that it assigns jumping to R1 or R2, which takes some getting used to if you expect it to be the X button as in so many other platformers, but once you get past that, the controls are highly fluid.

I’ve been disappointed several times when it comes to revisiting classic games, going so far as to quit very early on in my playthrough because things just weren’t as I remembered them. If I can draw a line between all those experiences, it’s that for some reason or another, the gameplay did not hold up, and if Ape Escape was such a fun experience for me in 2024, it’s precisely because the gameplay absolutely holds up.

Yes, the premise - catch apes - is simple, but the way in which you go about it and the fluidity of how you approach each catch is still just as fun now as I remember it being in 1999.

It’s not a huge insight that gameplay, or how fun the game is, should be the most important aspect of any game, above even graphics and sound, and it’s good that Ape Escape has this in spades, because as you’d expect from a quarter century-old game, everything else is pretty rough.

To be fair, the developers did a lot with the Playstation for the time: the colors are bright, the framerate is pretty good, the worlds are large, and load times are kept to a minimum (though this could be different for you if you are playing on the CD-based PSX). Also, though it’s perfectly fair to call the graphics “rough” a more positive spin would be to say that they deliver that Playstation “aesthetic” that is so immediately familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the system. If that’s something you enjoy, Ape Escape has you covered.

I do have a few quibbles with the game.

The music is at best alright, and sometimes, it even comes across as “cringey”, especially in the more Eastern-themed levels.

Also, the secondary enemies are really, really boring in terms of design, though I suspect that has to do with the technical limitations of the time in that you can’t have huge worlds and a ton of polygons left over for enemies. I do have to say though that the design of the apes themselves is fantastic: the animations are great, they are all assigned different personalities, and generally they just come across as very “cute”, the game designers did an excellent job here.

My last complaint, if you can call it that, is that the game requires time trials to finish it to 100%. I can’t stand time trials unless they are in a racing game so I always skip these, though thankfully Ape Escape on PS4 allows you to get a platinum trophy without even attempting a single one. I beat the game twice to get the full ending, collected all the Specter coins and caught all the monkeys, and this got me to 84.9% completion, which is likely where I’ll stay forever and is enough that I can now consider this gaming loose end fully tied up.

I have now bought Ape Escape 2 for PS2 and will be looking to pick up Ape Escape 3 as well, I’ll report back one day when I’ve finished each one though I suspect they will also be highly entertaining.

If you haven’t played the original in some time or you are a modern gamer who has never experienced it and can get passed the 1990’s graphics, I think you will have an excellent time with Ape Escape.