Lady Bug

Universal built Lady Bug in 1981, a year into the maze-chase gold rush Pac-Man started, and at a glance it belongs to the pile of imitations that followed. One mechanic keeps it out of that pile: you can rebuild the maze while you are running through it.

You steer a ladybug around corridors eating flowers, hearts and letters while other insects chase you. Enemies emerge from the centre of the maze, and the release schedule is visible rather than arbitrary - a marker travels around the outer border of the screen, and each completed circuit sends another bug out, up to four at once. On stages two and five the marker speeds up, so pressure ramps in a way you can plan against instead of merely suffering. The first eight levels each introduce a new insect with its own movement pattern; from level nine onward four different types are loose simultaneously.

The turnstiles are why the game matters. Twenty green gates sit at junctions throughout the maze, and pushing against one swings it, opening some routes and sealing others. The layout carefully prevents you from walling off a section entirely, so this is a tool rather than an exploit: you redirect a pursuer, open an escape that did not exist a second earlier, or accidentally shape a corridor into a trap for yourself. It turns a reflex game into one with a short planning horizon, which almost none of its contemporaries attempted. The 1983 Arcade Awards handed it a Certificate of Merit as runner-up for most innovative coin-op, citing the turnstiles specifically.

Arcades never really took to it. The game found its audience as a ColecoVision launch title, where it also gained a Vegetable Harvest bonus round for completing the SPECIAL register, with an Intellivision port following. Reviewers of the home versions complained that the ladybug moved stiffly and jerkily, which is a fair charge; the coin-op is smoother. It runs in the browser here. Expect a short game with a hard ceiling and enough strategy underneath to justify more than a curiosity run.