Q*bert

"Q-bert" redirects here. For the DJ, see DJ Q-bert.

Q*bert
Developer(s)	Gottlieb
Publisher(s)	Gottlieb
Designer(s)	Warren Davis and Jeff Lee
Platform(s)	Arcade
Release	December 31, 1982
Genre(s)	Platform
Mode(s)	Up to 2 players, alternating turns

Q*bert is a 1982 arcade game published by Gottlieb, created by Warren Davis and Jeff Lee.

Description

In Q*bert, the player maneuvers the eponymous character around 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).

Level design

On early levels, the player's 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 Q*bert hops off the edge of the pyramid of cubes he falls to his demise. When this occurred, 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.

When I looked at it, it occurred to me you could sculpt a pyramid out of it such that if a ball fell onto the top, it would have two choices of which way to bounce, so with one random byte I could create a path for a falling ball.

— Warren Davis

The "changing the cube colours" idea came quite late in game development. Davis and Lee had implemented the pyramid level and enemies, but were unsure of what the Q*berts goal would be. It was Ron Waxman, vice-president of engineering at Gottlieb, who suggested having the cubes change colour when the player landed on them.

Enemies

Q*bert is 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, Q*bert has to deal with "Slick" and "Sam," two green creatures who turn cubes back to their original color when they hop on them. Q*bert can eliminate Slick or Sam by jumping onto them.

Aside from some strategic hopping, Q*bert's only defenses 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.

Q*bert's Qubes

Sound

Q*bert's use of sound was one of its 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 were not understandable. In frustration, 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.

Q*bert the character

The protagonist of the game, Q*bert, is a squat, orange 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.

Merchandising

The animated cartoon merchandising tie-in debuted on CBS' 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.

Aftermath and legacy

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.

Ports

Q*bert was ported to numerous home systems and was remade several times.

• 1983 - Parker Brothers ported it to ColecoVision, Intellivision, Philips Videopac, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, TI 99/4A and the Commodore 64. They also finished, but never released, a port for the ZX Spectrum.
• 1989 - ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy by Konami's Ultra Games division.
• 1999 - a PlayStation version was released.
• 2000 - the release of new versions for Game Boy Color, Windows and Dreamcast.
• 2005 - the new version of Q*bert is repackaged with a ROM emulation of the original and titled "Q*bert 2005". For unknown reasons, the swear bubble is removed from the both versions of the game.
• 2007 - a port of the arcade game (including a border reproducing the artwork on the original machine) was made available as a download from the PlayStation Store on the PlayStation 3.

Q*bert is also one of the three standard games on the Sony Ericsson T610 and T630 mobile phones, published by Sony and available on a variety of handsets. Some were ports of the original code, others complete re-writes of the game.

Q*bert in popular culture

Film and television

• There is a reference to Q*bert in the Family Guy episode "Stuck Together, Torn Apart", in which the ghosts try to cheer up Pac-man after Mrs. Pac-man left him. When their efforts fail, one of them mentions going to Q*bert's. Another reference occurs in "Chick Cancer", when Stewie complains about Q*bert leaving all the lights on (after turning the blocks yellow), then mentioning how he won't split the electric bill if Q*bert continues.
• An animated version of Q*bert that speaks backwards appears in the Futurama episode "Anthology of Interest II." When played backwards he actually says "Where can a guy get some pants around here?".
• In the Channel 102 series Gemberling (episode 4), the main character Gemberling gets attacked by a Q*bert.
• In the 1980s sitcom Silver Spoons a Q*bert machine is prominently displayed in the arcade room of the house belonging to the main characters.
• In the movie The King of Kong, Billy Mitchell helps Doris Self try to break the world record for the highest score on Q*bert.
• The television show Square One featured a video game called Pauline's Perilous Pyramid. It is reminiscent of Q*bert, except the pyramid is numbered with positive and negative numbers. Each time she jumped on a square, that number was added to her score. Her goal was to reach the top of the pyramid and keep her score between +25 and -25. She also was given one "zapper" which allowed her to change a positive to a negative or vice versa.

Music

• Q*bert inspired hip-hopper Richard Quitevis' stage name, DJ Q-bert.
• The band System of a Down's self-titled album contains a song named CUBErt.

Other

• In the Nintendo GameCube game Baten Kaitos, after a certain puzzle is completed, the current room turns into a pyramid of cubes with monsters hopping up and down the sides, a la Q*bert.
• In America (The Book), the caption to a picture of a red button reads: "The power to press this button, which launches both the World's Largest Nuclear Arsenal and a free play of Q-Bert."
• In Rayman 2 for the Dreamcast, there is a bonus level which is Q*bert styled but not in the direct form of a pyramid.

External links

• Q*bert at the Killer List of Videogames
• Template:StrategyWiki
• Creation of Q*bert by creator Warren Davis
• History of Q*bert by character artist Jeff Lee
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• Entry for Q*bert's Quest at the Internet Pinball Database
• Creation of the Game Boy Color version