Janitor Joe

Joe is the only human left on a space station whose robots have turned against him. To escape he needs to find the keys scattered through the rooms, make his way across platforms and avoid falls. In Janitor Joe, the maintenance job ends up as a race to get out of a building that is no longer safe.

Kevin Bales is credited in the built-in instructions of this DOS edition, dated 1984. That credit makes it possible to correct the author name shown in the RetroBat file. The intro and the help are in English; the game uses platform lines, ladders and small characters in CGA colors.

The keyboard is chosen before you start

The first screen explains the story and the controls. A key takes you to the title, where C changes the control type and P starts the game. To use the keyboard you must select it before starting; seeing the characters move in the menu background does not mean you are already controlling a game.

The arrow keys move Joe and Space makes him jump. End and PgDn also appear as short one-step moves to the left and right. That precision is useful when lining up in front of a ladder or near the edge of a platform. The character can keep moving forward, so it pays to prepare each jump and correct before you run out of floor.

Keys, robots and oxygen

The original help mentions five rooms, five difficulty levels and a hidden special room. The obstacles include robots, gaps and falls that are too long, as well as oxygen. Some rooms add their own elements, such as the slides in the second room.

The download keeps two executables of the same size, JANJOE.EXE and JANITOR JOE.EXE, which differ by two bytes. Both show the Kevin Bales credit. JANJOE.EXE is used for the browser; the difference has not been presented as a new game or as a conversion for another machine.