Riddle of Pythagoras

Riddle of Pythagoras is a Japanese arcade game released by Sega in 1986 under the title Pythagoras no Nazo. The title screen says 1986, but it actually reached arcades in January 1987. Programming was handled by Eleca, Aicom also contributed to development, and production was managed by EXA Planning — a studio whose name was formed from the initials of those two companies.

By genre it belongs to the Breakout family of bat-and-ball games. The cabinet used a dial and two buttons, which is the configuration that suits paddle games best — an analogue dial gives far finer control than a joystick, and for this type of game that is a substantial difference. It ran on Sega System E hardware, a board essentially related to the Master System.

The Pythagoras reference is not incidental — the game is built around puzzles and its Japanese title, meaning Pythagoras's riddle, says so directly. Visually it is a colourful, cartoon-styled thing of the kind Sega was making for the domestic market in the mid-eighties.

It never properly left Japan, so it remains essentially unknown today. That is the main reason there is so little written about it and why it turns up in lists of emulated curiosities rather than in surveys of classics.

It is recommendable to people who collect less usual Japanese coin-ops and to paddle-game fans looking for something other than another Arkanoid clone. It loses out on modern controls, though — without a dial it plays noticeably worse than it did on the original cabinet.