Q*bert
A hopping orange creature with a long snout, a pyramid of colored cubes, and cursing in the form of speech bubbles full of nonsensical symbols. This is Q*bert, one of the most charismatic characters of the golden age of arcades, created in 1982 by Gottlieb. After two years of shooting games' dominance came a hit that didn't shoot at anything at all.
The concept is ingeniously simple. Qbert hops around an isometric pyramid made of twenty-eight cubes, and your task is to color each one by stepping on it. The complication is a whole menagerie of enemies: the snake-like Coily, who chases you relentlessly, balls falling from above, and creatures that change the cubes' colors back. The controls were unusual, because the joystick was rotated to a diagonal to match the diamond-shaped grid. A single wrong jump over the edge and Qbert would plunge into the void with a plaintive cry.
Behind the game stood designer Warren Davis and artist Jeff Lee. The game originally bore the working title Cubes, and Lee designed the little figure even before the mechanic itself existed. The famous phrase Q*bert utters when hit was created by hooking up a random speech generator, which produced pure gibberish accompanied by a bubble of strange symbols. This unintelligibility became part of his charm.
Q*bert quickly became a cultural phenomenon. He appeared on T-shirts, in his own animated series, and in a flood of ports to home systems from the Atari 2600 to the ColecoVision. For many people he remains to this day an icon of the era when arcades were pouring out original ideas one after another. He was reintroduced to modern audiences as a supporting character in the film Wreck-It Ralph and later in the comedy Pixels.
What's still fascinating about Q*bert is how few means it takes to create unforgettable gameplay. No complex rules, just a pyramid, hopping, and mounting panic as Coily corners you. It's clean design that has stood the test of time.
Why play: For the ageless addictiveness of a simple concept and an encounter with one of the most adorable and stubborn characters in all of arcade history.
Game 36 of 258 for Arcade
The same title elsewhere (2)
The Gottlieb arcade cabinet had its own speech-synthesis chip, letting Q*bert curse in those gibberish speech bubbles with actual voice, while rendering the pyramid as shaded, colored cubes that gave the image real depth. The Atari 2600 version, limited to the TIA sound chip's two channels and a thin color palette, had to drop the speech entirely — the character just beeps — and the cubes appear flat, without shading. It still ranks among the better conversions of its day: the jumping and pacing survive intact, only the visuals and audio fall short of the arcade board. To hear Q*bert's real mumbling, the arcade version is the one to seek out.
