Mr. Dig

Mr. Dig was published by Microdeal in 1984 and is an unashamed clone of the arcade machine Mr. Do!, which two years earlier had won over the arcades by taking the Dig Dug idea and adding fruit, pursuers and one very treacherous weapon. Here you get the same thing on the Commodore 64, without a licence and without apology.

The rules are simple and readable at a glance. You tunnel through the earth, collect cherries and run from the monsters pouring after you along the passages you dug. You have two ways to fight back. The first is a bouncing power ball you fire down a tunnel, which ricochets until it hits something — but until it returns you are defenceless, so every shot is a gamble. The second is undermining one of the big apples so that it drops at the exact moment an enemy is underneath. This is what turns the game into a puzzle played at speed: the tunnels you dig to escape are also the tracks your apples roll down and the corridors the monsters use to reach you.

Control is precise and the pace climbs nicely as the game gets used to you. The weakness is that after a few rounds you have seen everything it knows. The layouts change, the principle does not, and anyone who knows the original will notice that sound and animation are more modest than in the coin-op.

It is still a solid piece of work and a good example of what the home scene looked like before licences were policed. As ten minutes of arcade play between longer games, Mr. Dig holds up, and the simplicity of its template is honest fun.

On oldgame.cz it runs directly in your browser, with no installation and no emulator to set up.