dos_digdugclone

I had this game in a folder somewhere between a pirate copy and Monkey Island and never knew what it was called. Today, with time to explore, I see what it is — an exact copy of Dig Dug that someone ported to DOS probably hoping nobody would notice. Trust me, in the nineties at school, this was the version we played, not the officially released clone.

The game is simple as bread and butter. You dig across the canvas, arrow keys control direction, spacebar or Enter makes you dig. The goal is to get rid of all enemies — in this case something like meat with eyes, which Dig Dug fans would recognize blindfolded. You lure them into a hole and then throw a tire or whatever's rolling around at them. Every level is basically the same, just slower and pointlessly harder.

Keys respond as they should, graphics are a sad rectangle on a black background. Sound? Beeping. Nothing fancy. The game does exactly what it promises — dig, run, repeat. The problem is that after twenty minutes you've figured out all the tricks. There are only three or four screens and they cycle over and over. There's no originality here and aging is cruel — today you have no reason to play it when you can find the original everywhere.

What keeps it alive is exactly that retro purity. There's no Windows or sounds that'll cut your throat. Just you and the enemy and one simple idea. For people who grew up with this type of game — and trust me, we all did — it's like an old friend at the bar. No glory, no bombast, but you know exactly what you're getting.

Today you'll play it in a browser as a curiosity. As proof that Dig Dug was so simple it could be programmed in DOS as a side project. It's not worth coming back to, but fifteen minutes of dead time would probably get eaten up. After all, what do you expect from a clone of a clone?