Hundreds of metres above a burning city, a businessman crashes out of an office window. He arcs across the sky before curling into a stuntman’s tumble. He loses no momentum as he lands on the roof below and straightens into a sprint, his suit jacket flapping in the quickening wind. He leaps over a gap, his arms rotating like helicopter blades as he soars across it. He lands, and, accelerating again, continues to bolt from the unseen terror in pursuit. He miscalculates the next gap and leaps prematurely, then falls in slow motion toward a grisly death on the sidewalk below. A postmortem appears on the screen: “You ran 1533m before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death.” This is what it’s like to play Canabalt, a video game that has sparked an entirely new genre of play for mobile phones.

After thirty-odd years of invention and iteration, wholly new gaming genres rarely emerge, and when they do, they are often niche. But the “endless runner,” as the genre is called, has quickly become ubiquitous in the smartphone era. Temple Run is the second most downloaded game in Apple’s App Store, while a similar title, Jetpack Joyride, has exceeded a hundred million downloads. In these games, players attempt to see how far they can successfully gallop and tumble along a track before they trip and crash. It is a simple style of game to play and, apparently, a simple style of game to create.

“The first endless runner I played was Canabalt,” said Luke Muscat, Jetpack Joyride’s designer. “You had this single button to jump. I loved the juxtaposition of high-intensity action with absolute simplicity.” Prior to Canabalt’s release, game makers had struggled to reconcile the smartphone’s absence of buttons with the interactive complexities of contemporary video games. Canabalt’s solution was elegant and simple: tap anywhere on the glass and your character leaps. Muscat recalled: “I remember playing Canabalt and just thinking, How has nobody ever thought of this before?”

Canabalt’s creator, Adam Saltsman, had been searching for a follow-up to Wurdle, his first commercially successful game, since its 2008 release. He built a number of prototypes, but none of his ideas had that indefinable frisson required of a smash hit. “I wasn’t feeling depressed,” he said. “But I was feeling keen angst. I’d spent at least a year not finishing the things I’d started.”

Saltsman found his way into the Experimental Gameplay Project, a monthly “game jam,” in which participants have just seven days to create a game for a specified theme. “Everything tumbled out in a very practical manner; the design was dictating what I should be doing,” he said. “I knew there was going to be a guy running and jumping over gaps, and I knew I wanted the game to be fast, like a racing game. I love games that deliver a sense of vertigo.” Inspiration for the rooftop setting came from the title sequences of the Bond movie “Casino Royale” and the television series “Mad Men,” both of which featured suited men running along or falling from tall buildings.

Set against the muted backdrop of a city under siege, Canabalt’s distinctive color scheme came about through an early image that Saltsman drew. “There were only six colors in my sketch, but I liked the look of it so I ended up using that to do all the final artwork,” said Saltsman. “I gave the character a suit, as I needed him to stand out against the grays of the cityscape behind. If he wasn’t black and white, you simply weren’t going to see him.”

By the end of the week, the game was ready. But it needed a name. That summer, Saltsman had watched his nephew shouting “cannonball” as he jumped into the pool. “At the same time, we were playing a PlayStation game in the evenings that featured catapults. He had real difficulty pronouncing this word. We would practice it, and he would scrunch up his face and say ‘Canabalt,’ ” Saltsman said. “We’ve since made a healthy donation to his college fund.”

Canabalt launched quietly. Saltsman posted a short message on a game-developer forum, pointing readers toward a Web site where they could play the game. Word of Canabalt spread throughout the close-knit community of indie game makers and spilled onto social networks. A couple of weeks later, Saltsman received an e-mail from Scott Stoddard, a game designer at Adult Swim, seeking permission to riff on Canabalt, and promising that his game would look very different.

Stoddard’s game, Robot Unicorn Attack, took Canabalt’s basic template and re-skinned it with Saturday-morning-cartoon exuberance. You play as a robotic unicorn with a rippling rainbow mane, collecting pixies while Erasure’s “Always” plays in the background. The combination of Adult Swim’s vast audience and the game’s quirky theme transformed Robot Unicorn Attack into an Internet meme.

While the term “endless runner” had yet to be coined, the creation of Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack indicated the discovery of a new type of video game. Within a few months, the App Store was teeming with clones.

While nobody would contest that Canabalt had popularized the genre, some doubt whether it originated it, Saltsman included: “Two months after Canabalt’s release, I remembered an old DOS game. You had to fly a helicopter down a tunnel, avoiding obstacles in order to see how far you could go.” Saltsman wasn’t the only one probing his memory for Canabalt’s predecessors. As Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors tried to pin down the origins of the endless runner, discussion turned to a 1983 Commodore 64 game, B.C.’s Quest for Tires.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak left Atari to develop the first Apple home computer, Chuck Benton was working for a company developing flight simulators. “I was running field engineering for the company, which meant I had to fly to training locations whenever anything went wrong with one of the machines,” he said. “I pleaded for the company to buy me an Apple, saying I would write the software to automate the paperwork side of my work. It worked.”

Benton, a self-taught programmer, started work on a video game. His first project was Softporn Adventure, in which players had to convince women to sleep with the lead character. After failing to find anyone willing to advertise and promote the game, he sold the rights to the video-game publisher Sierra. It would later turn the game into the Leisure Suit Larry series.

Sierra hired Benton to convert its ColecoVision titles to the Commodore 64 and, over the next two years, the young programmer adapted no fewer than twenty games. “I’d play the game as far as I could,” explained Benton, “and then would, essentially, create a knock-off of what I’d seen.” One of these titles was B.C.’s Quest For Tires, in which players guide a caveman riding a unicycle around obstacles as he races to save his kidnapped girlfriend. “I caught up with their programmers and so began designing the second half of the game myself, even though it wasn’t part of the contract.” Sierra liked Benton’s design work so much they requested he start sending his builds back to their offices, for their in-house designers to copy.