Q*bert (MB Hall of Fame Inductee)

Hall of Fame Inductee
Q*bert
Original Release: 1982 (Arcade)
Developer: Gottlieb
Publisher: Gottlieb

While Pac-Man has become the symbol of arcade gaming from the early 80s, it’s way to forget that Pac-Man had competition. Namco’s most famous character had mass-market appeal beyond the video game realm. But it wasn’t alone and it had fierce competition. For years, it competed with Gottlieb’s Q*bert for the hearts and minds of gamers.

The concept of the game is very simple. The player controls this orange thing around a pyramid to change the colour of all the platforms on the pyramid into the desired colour. There are enemies that try to stop Q*bert from completing his task. If an enemy touches Q*bert or if he falls off the pyramid it spells doom for him. There are special platforms that Q*bert can jump on that will transport him to the top of the pyramid and deke out the enemies chasing after him. Later levels have more enemies who are also faster and more deceptive. The game plays on a continuous loop until the player runs out of lives. The player controlled Q*Bert using a joystick that is tilted at a 45^o angle (this is because of the angle of the pyramid).

Q*bert’s birth is a miracle in it of itself. Gottlieb was more known for making pinball games although they had made video games prior to Q*bert. However, the company’s video games were nothing to write home about and the public took to them like kids take to spinach flavoured ice cream. The team working on Q*Bert wanted to create a simple project. In fact, even when they began to develop some of the original ideas of the game, some game mechanisms were scrapped; like the idea of Q*Bert shooting pellets out of his large nose because they wanted a simpler experience. This is sort of backwards considering that the pyramid the game is played on was designed using Escher’s cube in mind.

However, the team knew what they wanted to do with the game and it was a relatively concise process developing it. The major issues were seemed to come out of nowhere. Little things seemed to be the biggest obstacles at times. The game seemed to have a new name every week. Q*Bert wasn’t even in the running at the beginning. It had been called “Cubes” for the initial stages of production but it was never intended to be the final name. Although “Cubes” did eventually help sow the seeds of the final title. They had decided that the game was going to be named after the main character. One idea that was floated around was that the character would be named after his catch-phrase “@!#?@!?”. However, nobody knew exactly how to pronounce the catch-phrase or if was even family friendly. The name Hubert was passed around and the concept of combining Hubert with “Cubes” would make for a great idea. Thus, the name Q*Bert was born.

It’s interesting that compared to games from other traditional video game companies like Atari, Namco’s Pac-Man seemed to have no equal. The closest was Donkey Kong but considering that Pac-Man made way more money through licensing of the character, it was the king of the hill. However, the two companies that came closest to coming out on top over the pill popper were pinball companies. Williams actually stole the crown of top grossing game at the arcades with Defender. Gottlieb took it to Pac-Man outside of the arcades with very successful ventures in other media. A series of short cartoons were produced and ran for a while. There were also toys and various articles made of the mascot that made Q*bert the biggest money-making item for Gottlieb at the time.

Despite this, Gottlieb did a poor job following up to the original. It was ported over to various home consoles over the years. However, unlike other companies like Namco and Midway who have released compilation packages of their arcade hits on recent hardware, Gottlieb has been relatively quit. The latest retail ports were for the original Playstation and the Dreamcast; both of which offered the original game plus a reworked version with improved graphics. There is a version of the game available for mobile devices as well as for the Playstation 3 through the Playstation Network. For the most part, many gamers whose first system is the Xbox 360 or the Wii, probably haven’t played the original game.

There have been sequels although they didn’t do all that well. Q*bert’s Qubes was released for the arcade offering similiar gameplay to the original with more flash and a slightly different design. There was also a game called Q*bert 3 released for the SNES that was only a step up graphically and didn’t really expand the gameplay. Also, Gottlieb tried to make some money with Q*bert for their pinball division although it wasn’t all that successful and not all that many units were developed making it a very rare pinball title. Since then, other than for a few ports, Q*bert has been spending his days in Boca.

It’s hard to imagine why Q*Bert hasn’t been able to have as strong a legacy as games like Pac-Man or Frogger despite the fact that during its heyday it stood toe-to-toe with Pac-Man. A major reason is because Gottlieb wasn’t a major player in the video game business and their top priority was pinball. Despite it not looking like it was much of a priority for the company, Q*bert took the arcades by storm. Q*Bert had more personality than most of the games of its era. When things weren’t going well, Q*bert swore, which made us feel like the character in the game understood its plight rather than just act as a bunch of unconscious pixels on the screen. The thought of this game not being as readily accessible as Pac-Man or Frogger is today make us want to scream @!#?@!?. However, Q*Bert’s induction into the Madness Brewing Video Game Hall of Fame is cause for celebration and not pixelated profanity.