Special thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org for the great source material.
Recently, I visited a strange dimension of coloured cube pyramids, where I met Q*bert.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Q*bert, it’s a pleasure to meet such a colourful character such as you. First, I just want to tell you how much fun I had playing your game on my Colecovision when I was a kid!
Q*bert: Thank you, thank you! Be careful where you stand; I don’t want either of us to be hit on the head by a bouncing ball or something else.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Okay, I’ll be careful. Tell me about your game and how you started up.
Q*bert: Q*bert is a 1982 arcade game published by Gottlieb, created by Warren Davis and Jeff Lee.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Interesting! Now please tell me the basic gameplay.
Q*bert: I jump around on an isometric pyramid-like structure of tri-colored cubes. Q*bert’s purpose is to hop around the tops of these cubes, changing every square to a specific color (e.g., from blue to yellow).
On early levels, my task is as simple as a single hop on each cube. Later rounds become more challenging: cubes have to be touched twice, cubes change back to the wrong color if they get hopped on again, etc. If I hop off the edge of the pyramid of cubes I’ll die! The original arcade machine cabinet would issue a mechanical sound produced by a pinball machine knocker.
The level layout was inspired by another programmer, Kan Yabumoto, who had filled a screen with an Escher-like cubes pattern. Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972), also known as M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically-inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Your classic game wouldn’t be the same without your classic enemies. Could you please review them?
Q*bert: I am constantly harassed by an assortment of enemies. “Coily” the snake appears at the top of the pyramid inside a purple ball, bouncing toward the bottom of the screen. Once he hits the bottom row of cubes, the snake springs out from inside, hopping around in pursuit of the little orange protagonist. Red balls also appear at the top of the pyramid, bringing bouncing death if they collide with Q*bert on the way down.
Other threats come from “Ugg” and “Wrong-Way,” a purple pig and gremlin team who bounce along the side of the cubes. Additionally, I have to deal with “Slick” and “Sam,” two green creatures who turn cubes back to their original color when they hop on them. I can eliminate Slick or Sam by jumping on them.
Aside from some strategic hopping, Q*bert’s only defences are the spinning discs at the side of the pyramid and the green balls that bounce across the squares. The discs provide a quick escape, floating Q*bert back to the top of the pyramid as Coily jumps to his death in pursuit. The green balls freeze the enemies, giving Q*bert a free run of the pyramid for a limited time.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Please tell us about the sound.
Q*bert: My use of sound was one of the games most distinctive features. The game’s sound board contained a Votrax speech synthesis chip, but according to David Thiel, who created the sounds for the game, the chip’s output was so poor that some words weren’t understandable. Frustrated, he programmed it to produce random phonemes, and discovered that the result sounded like an alien language. This randomized speech, played at different pitches, became the voices of Ugg, Wrongway, Slick, Sam, and Q*bert himself.
Dedicated upright cabinets for Q*bert contain a solenoid that creates a knocking sound inside the cabinet whenever a character falls off the pyramid, simulating the sound a character might make if it actually fell to the bottom of the cabinet. In some units, this sound is created by a bean bag inside the case rigged to fall. This resulted in more of a “thud” than the distinctive “pop” created by the solenoid equipped cabinets.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Tell us how you, the star of the game, came to be.
Q*bert: I have been described as a squat, orange pantsless character with a tubular nose and expressive eyes. Whenever he is caught by the enemy, a comical “swearing” bubble appears with “@!#?@!” (note that the “@” signs were originally simple “spiral” marks in the game). This is an early example of a video game character showing emotion, allowing players to identify with it. It is this human connection that initiated various items of merchandising, such as a Q*bert doll and a Saturday morning cartoon.
The character was designed by Jeff Lee, who had been drawing goofy characters since he was young, inspired by comics, cartoons and Mad magazine. Q*bert’s distinctive tubular nose was originally intended for him to shoot projectiles from (and the game would have been called “Snots and Boogers”), an idea supported by everyone at Gottlieb apart from Warren Davis. Since Davis was the only programmer on the project, this idea never made it into the game.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Ha ha ha! That is funny.
Q*bert: Very drole.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: I understand that you became a commercial success. Please tell us about that…
Q*bert: The animated cartoon merchandising tie-in debuted on CBS’s Saturday Supercade, with the orange furball now sporting arms, a mouth, a pair of sneakers, and a high school letterman’s jacket. All of Q*bert’s friends and enemies were also featured in the cartoon, along with some show-exclusive characters that had never appeared in the games. The setting of the segment in the Saturday Supercade was “Q-Burg”. One notable feature about the cartoon segment was that it was the only segment in the entire show that used the game’s original sound effects. Furthermore, the original concept of having Q*bert fire projectiles from his nose also made it into the cartoon in the form of black oil slick balls called “slippy-do’s”. Q*bert was a natural for the merchandising world, and stores soon stocked up on Q*bert dolls, lunchboxes, sleeping bags, and more. A board game and a card game were also created.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Now, Q*bert, as you may be aware, the video game crash of 1983…
Q*bert: Yes, of course…
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: What legacy have you left since then?
Q*bert: The video game crash of 1983 brought an end to Q*bert’s reign. The market’s collapse delivered a death blow to Q*bert’s arcade sequel, Q*bert’s Qubes. While retaining the iconic pyramid field of play, Q*bert’s Qubes added further challenges to gameplay by scattering the cubes into separate space. Now, when Q*bert hopped off, the cubes actually rotated to a new side, shifting in the direction of Q*bert’s jump.
These new touches failed to generate much interest in a depressed market. Few Q*bert’s Qubes machines even made it to the public, and the character’s arcade career was over. A third arcade game was also under development in 1983, but never made it out of the prototype stage. In-house, it was called “Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert (FHMC Q*bert)”. The only existing stand-up arcade version of FHMC Q*bert resides in creator Warren Davis’s personal collection.
In 1983, Gottlieb created a Q*bert themed four-flipper pinball table called Q*bert’s Quest. The table was unusual in that the bottom two flippers were inverted in an upside-down ‘V’ fashion. The game reused sounds taken from in the Q*bert arcade game, as well as a spoken sample from Q*bert itself: a squeaky “Bye Bye” when the game concluded.
Q*bert was also featured in the cartoon Saturday Supercade (every other Saturday in the first season and every Saturday in the second), though it has only tangential similarities to the game’s premise. The characters are depicted as a 50′s society of multiple “Q*berts” (the main Q*bert character was identifiable by his orange color and jacket with sneakers). Enemies such as Coily (now with arms), his new girlfriend Viper, Wrong Way and Ugg serve as the neighborhood bullies. Slick and Sam also appeared in the show as Q*Bert’s friends. His other friends included his girlfriend Q*Tee, Q*Ball, Q*Val and Q*Mongus. Even the Earth itself is shaped like a cube.
Q*bert remained available in home system conversions and in the Super NES’s Q*bert 3. Games inspired by Q*bert include Pogo Joe for the Commodore 64, Pharaoh’s Pyramid for the Atari 800 and Bert: The Rise and Fall of a Swedish Politician for the Macintosh Classic. Another related game was the 1998 pseudo-sequel for the PC entitled “Q*Bob,” although this featured a more humanoid character.
Sproingies, a popular plugin for the XScreenSaver program, is a three-dimensional animation in the style of Q*bert. It consists of an infinite staircase of Q*bert cubic blocks, down which several spring-like characters race in a manner similar to a Slinky descending a staircase. When two characters collide, both explode, and two replacement characters join the race, each arising from the top surface of one of the blocks.
The original Q*bert game was released for Game Boy Color and PlayStation. The PS version featured new graphics.
In 2007, a remake of Q*bert called SpongeBob’s Pyramid Peril was posted on the official website of SpongeBob SquarePants.
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Q*bert, thank you for talking with me tonight!
Q*bert: You’re welcome. LOOK-OUT! IT’S COILY! He’s coming for you!
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: Yikes! Thanks for the warning! I’m outa here!
Q*bert: Don’t forget to play my game!
VGOTheMeekGeekVGV: I won’t! Bye!
