Cutie Q

Cutie Q is a Namco arcade game from 1979 — prehistory by industry standards, from the era before Pac-Man. It is a distinctive blend of ball and paddle play with pinball: you control a paddle at the bottom edge while the ball smashes blocks and bounces off little characters in the upper part of the screen.

The game follows Gee Bee and Bomb Bee, the titles with which Namco entered original game development, and Toru Iwatani — the man who would create Pac-Man a year later — worked on it. In his career Cutie Q is a visible stepping stone: against its austere predecessors it adds cute animated characters, precisely the move that would soon turn Pac-Man into a phenomenon.

In 1979 the arcades were full of variations on Breakout and pinball, and Cutie Q shows the Japanese style gradually hatching from that template — softer shapes, humour, and characters where Western designs favoured abstraction. In hindsight you can read the future of the whole company in it.

According to the record two players could take turns at the cabinet, as was the custom of the day. The rules take ten seconds to grasp; the subtleties of the rebounds take hours — the classic arcade equation.

Best of all, this piece of prehistory runs directly in your browser on OldGame.cz, so you can feel for yourself how Namco played one year before Pac-Man.