The early-90s shareware scene was flooded with side-scrolling platformers trying to out-Keen Commander Keen, and most of them leaned on the same run-and-jump toolkit. Electro Man, developed by xLand Games and published by Epic MegaGames in 1992, found a different hook: build every level around a network of teleporters instead of straightforward platforming, and turn navigation itself into the puzzle.
Jacek and the Teleporter Maze
You control Jacek, a small electric hero armed with a basic energy blaster, working through a series of increasingly tricky industrial levels. What makes Electro Man distinct from its shareware contemporaries is that reaching a switch, a key, or the exit almost never means walking straight there — it means figuring out which teleporter leads where, and in what order you need to hit them to avoid getting cornered by patrolling enemies.
It’s a smart way for a small studio to differentiate itself in a genre where dozens of competitors were shipping visually similar games. xLand Games didn’t have Apogee or Epic’s resources, but the teleporter-routing hook gives Electro Man an identity that pure run-and-gun platforming wouldn’t have.
The industrial setting reinforces that identity too. Rather than the cartoonish, brightly colored worlds most Keen-inspired platformers favored, Electro Man leans into a grittier, mechanical aesthetic that suits its teleporter-and-switch puzzle logic — factory corridors and industrial hazards feel like a more natural home for that kind of routing puzzle than a whimsical cartoon landscape would.
Getting Through the Industrial Levels
- Map out a teleporter network mentally before committing to a route — jumping in blind is how you end up cornered by a patrolling robot with no way back.
- Prioritize weapon power-ups over score pickups like microchips when you have to choose; your basic blaster struggles against the more aggressive turret enemies in later levels.
- Watch enemy patrol timing near teleporter exits specifically — arriving at the wrong moment can drop you right into a hazard you had no way of seeing beforehand.
- Since lives are limited, treat unfamiliar teleporter chains cautiously on a first pass rather than committing fully; scout before you commit.
- Revisit earlier teleporter hubs once you’ve cleared nearby obstacles — some routes only become useful once a later switch has been thrown, so a dead-end early on isn’t necessarily permanent.
Epic MegaGames Before Unreal
It’s worth remembering what Epic MegaGames actually was in 1992: a young shareware publisher still finding its footing, years away from Unreal, Gears of War, or Fortnite. Electro Man is part of that early catalog, alongside other small-studio collaborations the publisher took on while building out its reputation in the PC shareware scene.
Seen from that angle, Electro Man is a useful reminder that the biggest names in the industry today often started by publishing modest, scrappy games from studios nobody had heard of. xLand Games never became a household name, but their teleporter-puzzle platformer got a real shot at an audience specifically because Epic MegaGames was willing to publish smaller, riskier shareware titles during this period of the company’s history.
Standing Out From the Keen-Alikes
Electro Man arrived during a genuine flood of shareware platformers, and most of them are honestly hard to tell apart today — the same basic run-jump-shoot loop with a different mascot pasted on top. The teleporter-puzzle structure is what saves Electro Man from being just another entry in that pile; it asks you to think about routing and sequencing in a way pure platforming never does, closer to a light puzzle game wearing a platformer’s skin.
It’s not without rough edges — the difficulty curve on later levels leans harder on trial-and-error memorization than I’d like, since some teleporter chains are genuinely difficult to reason out without dying once first. But as a free, shareware-era curiosity, it’s a genuinely worthwhile way to spend an evening.
What sticks with me most after replaying it is how confidently a small studio committed to a single unusual idea rather than trying to cram in every mechanic the genre had to offer. That kind of focus is honestly rarer in shareware platformers than you’d expect, where the pressure to compete on feature lists sometimes crowded out the kind of singular hook that makes Electro Man worth remembering.
If you’re coming to it fresh, give the first couple of levels more patience than instinct suggests. The teleporter logic takes a level or two to click, and players who bail early expecting a straightforward run-and-gun miss the point of what the game is actually asking of them.
It’s a short game by modern standards, but that brevity works in its favor — the teleporter puzzle hook doesn’t overstay its welcome, and the whole shareware episode can be cleared in an evening without the idea wearing thin the way it might across a much longer, padded-out release.
Downloading Electro Man
If you’ve never set DOSBox up before, walking through our complete setup guide first will save you some frustration.
DOSBox Steps for Electro Man
Extract the archive into its own folder, something like C:\GAMES\ELECTROMAN. Launch DOSBox, mount that folder as your virtual C drive with mount c C:\GAMES\ELECTROMAN, switch to it with c:, and run the EXE from the extracted folder. If the pace feels off, DOSBox’s speed controls (Ctrl+F11 / Ctrl+F12) can fine-tune things — our DOSBox guide above covers sound configuration and other common fixes in more detail.
Watch It in Action
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