Gopher

Gopher is an Atari 2600 arcade game from U.S. Games, the short-lived video game division of the Quaker Oats food company. The version here is the European release by Carrere Video from 1983 — a label that repackaged U.S. Games titles for the European market.

The premise is rural slapstick. You play a farmer with a shovel defending three carrots from a persistent gopher. The rodent burrows back and forth beneath the surface, occasionally digs a hole upward, and if he makes it above ground he grabs a carrot and drags it under. You run along the field, fill in the holes, and bonk the gopher on the head with your shovel whenever he pokes it out. Every so often a bird flies over and drops a seed: catch it and plant it, and a replacement carrot grows where a stolen one used to be.

That is the whole game — which is exactly how good Atari 2600 games worked. Everything happens on a single screen and lives on rhythm: the gopher keeps getting faster, holes multiply, and you can barely decide which one to fill first. Ten minutes will show you everything the game has, but the loop has an addictive pull and the chase for a high score holds up longer than you would expect.

The weakness is obvious: next to the console's best, Gopher is simple and its charm wears thin. It appeared while the Atari market was being flooded with third-party titles, and it belongs to the more decent end of that flood — honest craftsmanship without great ambitions, with clean readable graphics and fair rules.

You can play Gopher on oldgame.cz straight in your browser, no installation needed.