Namco’s hurdlin’ classic Metro-Cross joins the Arcade Archives

The Daddy Mack’ll make ya…

Something very different from the old-school players at Hamster this week, as Namco’s strange, science-fiction runner Metro-Cross joins the Arcade Archives — available to download now on PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

Released to the arcade market in 1985, before receiving ports to a wide variety of home computers, Metro-Cross is a fast-paced, side-scrolling runner, predating popular such as Temple Run and Canabalt by a good few decades. Players guide a jumpsuited protagonist as they sprint down a hi-tech corridor laden with traps, hazards, and obstacles. The crazy sprinting action is automatic and unstoppable, with the player tasked with keeping our star from coming a cropper at the myriad objects that lay strewn in their path.

Check out the action in the video below, courtesy of YouTuber World of Longplays.

In a crazy headlong dash against the clock, The Runner must dodge and/or leap over the obstacles, while picking up drinks to maintain their stamina and even boarding a handy skateboard in order to increase their momentum. Like so many fast scrolling titles of the day, Metro-Cross is a little dizzying, not helped by the game’s checkerboard pattern, but it’s an amusing oddity, and as such it’s neat to see it added to Hamster’s ever-growing collection of games that time forgot. A sequel, Aero-Cross, was being developed in the late-’00s for release on Xbox Live Arcade, but the game was ultimately canceled.

Metro-Cross is available to download now on PS4 and Nintendo Switch, priced at around $8.