Which Game Had the First Double Jump?

Guinness World Records lists Dragon Buster, an arcade game by Namco, as the first video game with a double jump and dates it to December 1984. Other sources date the same game to early 1985 or say only that the double jump reportedly began there, so earliest documented is the honest label.

Who claims what?

Source	Claim
Guinness World Records	First videogame to use the double jump: Dragon Buster, December 1984
Wikipedia	Calls it the earliest game with a double jump mechanic, citing Game Informer
Game Informer (Ben Reeves, 2014)	Says double jumping reportedly originated in a 1985 Japanese arcade platformer called Dragon Buster
r/AskHistorians answer	Calls it the first known appearance of the vertical double jump, and says the designer is unknown
NamCompendium	Calls it certainly the first Namco game with an inherent double jump, a narrower claim

The chain matters here. Wikipedia rests on Game Informer, and Game Informer itself writes "reportedly". The claim is widely repeated, but we found no developer statement behind it.

When did Dragon Buster come out?

The sources differ by a few months:

• December 1984, according to Guinness.
• January 1985 in Japan, according to Wikipedia, citing Masumi Akagi's arcade game list.
• February 1985 in Japan, according to NamCompendium.

For the question of priority the gap matters little, unless a rival game appeared in the same months. We found no such game with a source.

Is there an earlier candidate?

The r/AskHistorians answer mentions Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, released on ColecoVision in 1982, as having a secondary jump within a few frames of the first one, which gives a higher leap. That is a different thing from a second jump in mid-air, and the answer's author treats Dragon Buster as the first known vertical double jump anyway.

How did the double jump spread?

There is little evidence. The same answer argues that Strider, an arcade game from 1989, likely made the double jump widespread, and it says openly that this is speculation, because developers rarely talk about jump mechanics in interviews. We could not confirm this from a second source.

What counts as a double jump?

• A second jump in mid-air, without an item. This is the usual meaning and the one the Guinness record uses in its title.
• A second input that extends a jump from the ground. The Smurf case is described this way.
• A variation such as a wall jump or a flight item. These are related but different, and no source we read treats them as the same.

What can we say with confidence?

Dragon Buster, from around the turn of 1984 to 1985, is the earliest game we can document with a source naming it for a double jump. Guinness states it as a first. Anything beyond that, including who designed it and why, is not documented in the sources we found.