663 - Mr. Do!

The early days of video games were wild. One developer could come out with a game, and three to six months later another developer would come out with a blatant copy. They might slap on a different color palette, or change the music, but these games would be nearly identical.

The real wild part was, usually this wasn’t even an attempt to rip off someone else’s idea. They were just trying to make a game, any game, and trying to copy one that already existed was a good way to learn how to do that. This is the exact sort of thing that a school would have you do so you could learn the ropes. This is exactly what ninety percent of tutorials would have you do.

Releasing these games for commercial sale was just a consequence of there not being many developers, or rules about the copyright of games at the time.

Most of the time these games were exactly what I said before, copies. But every now and then a game would come along that wasn’t exactly a copy, but a riff on a common theme. Sometimes these games would even be better than the original.

Introducing, Mr. Do!

Mr. Do! Could easily be seen as just a Dig Dug clone. You crawl around in something that seems like it might be dirt just like Dig Dug. If you remove the support of heavy things they will fall down squishing anything below them. That’s straight out of Dig Dug. There are weird monsters chasing you, just like Dig Dug. Seems pretty open and shut, right? They went and cloned Dig Dug. Sure, except Mr. Do! plays nothing like Dig Dug.

Dig Dug is a puzzle action game where you can play fairly casually, if you manage the monsters. If you get caught by the monsters, you probably didn’t manage them well enough. You learn for next time and you do better.

Mr. Do! is a straight up action maze game where you create the maze. It’s what an arcade developer would come up with if you showed them a recording of Dig Dug and then placed them in a clean room to recreate it from scratch. You can see what they were going for, but it is so far removed from the original that it barely resembles it.

The object of the game is to collect every cherry on a level, not to destroy the monsters. Mr. Do, the character, has a long range superball to attack enemies with, but it bounces around, so it’s tricky to use and as soon as you throw it you are defenseless. If apples only fall one tile, they won’t break and you can push them over cliffs onto the monsters like you were defending a medieval castle.

Mr. Do! is not only a very different game from Dig Dug, it is a much more complex game. There are so many things to keep track of and manage, but after a few quick rounds you will start to figure it out. You will start to look for paths. You will always want to collect each group of eight cherries in one unbroken streak to get the collection bonus and listen to the music chime higher and higher.

Making anything is an iterative process. No video game sprang from nothing. Each game was, and continues to be, an iteration on what came before. Often, the next version of an idea will be better, more refined, than the previous one. In 1982 that process was happening at a breakneck pace. Dig Dug came out earlier the same year as Mr. Do!, yet Mr. Do! is packed with so much more.

The real kicker is, Dig Dug is not a bad game. Actually, it’s quite good. It’s just not as good as Mr. Do!. One of the Best Games.