When Video Games magazine visited Gottlieb’s offices in the Chicago suburb of Northlake in 1983, the company would not let it print the names of the people who had made its biggest hit. The programmer appeared as “D. Ziner”, the artist as “R. Teeste” and the sound man as “J. Walkman”; the vice-president, Howie Rubin, did most of the talking. The game was Q*bert, and it had been the sensation of the arcade trade show in Chicago the previous November. Gottlieb could not build machines fast enough. The men behind it were Warren Davis, a former Bell Labs engineer writing his first game, and Jeff Lee, the company’s artist, and the creature they made, an orange ball with legs and a long tube of a nose, became, in Retro Gamer’s judgement, one of the most merchandised arcade characters after Pac-Man.
Fast facts
- Maker: D. Gottlieb & Co., the Chicago pinball manufacturer, later renamed Mylstar Electronics.
- Program: Warren Davis. Art and characters: Jeff Lee. Sound: Dave Thiel.
- Released: 1982; shown at the AMOA show in Chicago in November 1982.
- Playfield: a pyramid of 28 cubes, seen in three-quarter view, with a diagonal joystick.
- Home versions: Parker Brothers, 1983, for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Commodore 64, VIC-20 and TI-99/4A; later versions on the NES and Game Boy, and Q*bert 3 on the Super NES (1992).
- Sequel: Q*bert’s Qubes, an arcade puzzle game about rotating cubes.
A game nobody planned
Pinball had long been Gottlieb’s main business; it moved into video games in the early 1980s. Its first three, No Man’s Land, New York! New York! and Reactor, fared worse than it hoped. Q*bert was not even on the list of ideas the new video team voted on in August 1982. “I think that Q*bert is just a classic case of a bunch of guys seeing something and making it happen,” Rubin told Video Games. “If penicillin was discovered by accident, so was Q*bert.”
It began with a screen of cubes. Another Gottlieb programmer, Kan Yabumoto, had filled a display with a pattern of hexagons that read as stacked 3D blocks. Lee, who liked optical illusions, built a pyramid from them and drew creatures to stand on it. “I just drew him,” he said of the hero. “And right from the start he was the initial character, fully formed.” His first proposal was complicated: the hero’s nose was meant to fire projectiles. Davis, who had joined after answering a newspaper advertisement for game programmers, set that aside. He started instead with “an exercise of programming randomness and gravity”, balls bouncing down the pyramid at random, with the orange character hopping about among them. The decisive idea came from Ron Waxman, Gottlieb’s vice-president of engineering, sitting behind Davis late one night: “What if the cubes changed colour when he lands on them?”
Playing it
The player steers Q*bert diagonally from cube to cube; each landing changes the colour of the cube’s top, and a round ends when every cube shows the target colour. On the first level one hop is enough. On the second, each cube needs two hops, through an intermediate colour, and on later levels a finished cube changes again if Q*bert lands on it. Hopping off the edge is fatal.
The enemies come from both ends. Red balls bounce down from the top. A purple ball reaches the bottom and hatches into Coily, a snake who follows Q*bert one or two hops behind. From the third round, Ugg and Wrong-Way appear from the bottom and creep along the sides of the cubes, and two green characters, Slick and Sam, hop down undoing Q*bert’s work; Q*bert can stop them by jumping on them. A green ball freezes everything for a few seconds. The escape is a spinning disc at the pyramid’s edge: jump onto it and Q*bert floats back to the top, while Coily, if he is close behind, falls to his death. JoyStik counted the scoring for its readers: 25 points a cube, 500 for luring Coily off the edge, 50 for each disc left unused. In July 1983 Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated set it against Gottlieb’s earlier Reactor, which had been hard to learn and then too easy: with Q-Bert, “it is instantly obvious what the player has to do there, but it becomes increasingly difficult to play”. It called the game Gottlieb’s “greatest success so far”.
The diagonal controls were controversial. Gottlieb mounted the joystick at an angle to match the pyramid, and some testers, Davis recalled, would “jump off three times in quick succession, basically losing their quarter in about ten seconds”. Most came back and tried again. Davis kept making the game easier, and later thought it went out “a bit too easy”.
The swearing
Q*bert’s voice is the part players remember. Gottlieb’s sound board had a phoneme generator, used mainly in pinball, which could string sounds into English but made it sound “very mechanical and lifeless”, Davis said. Dave Thiel had it emit phonemes at random instead. “Since you couldn’t understand what it said anyway, why not have it say its own thing?” the sound man told Video Games. The only real English, according to Davis, is “Hello, I’m turned on” at power-up and “Bye-bye” at the end of a game. When an enemy catches Q*bert, a cartoon speech balloon appears with the symbols “@!#?@!”, and the random noise sounds like cursing. “There’s an equal chance that he’ll say your name, his name, or your favorite four-letter word,” JoyStik told its readers in April 1983.
Lee came up with the symbols “on a lark”, he said. The speech balloon was so central that the game went out on test under that name, and Rubin wanted to keep it. The staff eventually settled on the character’s name instead, after “Hubert” became “Cubert” and then “Q-bert”. Rick Tighe, one of Gottlieb’s technicians, added one more sound: a pinball knocker inside the cabinet that thumped whenever Q*bert fell off the pyramid.
Q*bert at home and on television
Parker Brothers bought the home rights early, and by Christmas 1983 its advertisements offered Q*bert on the Atari 2600, 5200 and computers, ColecoVision, Intellivision, the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 and the TI-99/4A. Davis thought the ColecoVision version the most faithful. Gottlieb licensed the character to almost anyone: Electronic Games catalogued Q*bert figures, a Nelsonic watch, sleeping bags, bed sheets, pyjamas, a Halloween costume, a Kenner plush doll, Play-Doh sets, a board game and a card game from Parker Brothers, and even a Q*bert life raft. In 1983 CBS gave Q*bert his own segment, set at “Q*Bert High”, in its Saturday morning cartoon series Saturday Supercade, alongside Donkey Kong and Frogger.
None of the merchandising money reached the creators. Davis told Retro Gamer that he received a small bonus; a royalty scheme Gottlieb introduced later was not retroactive, and he estimated it would have paid him about $100,000. Lee got a bonus and a raise, “which was only good for two years, when the company went out of business”. The arcade sold about 25,000 cabinets, according to Retro Gamer. Davis’s tougher follow-up, Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert, failed its tests and was never released (he later gave its ROM images to the MAME emulator project), and the official sequel, Q*bert’s Qubes, was a different puzzle about rotating cubes. In January 1985 Electronic Games reported that Columbia Pictures Industries had closed Mylstar Electronics, the former Gottlieb, at the end of September 1984; it remembered the company for “last year’s mega-hit, Q*Bert”.
Later lives
The character outlived the company. There was a version for the NES, a Game Boy game in 1992 and Q*bert 3 for the Super NES, which Nintendo Magazine System found “flawless” in 1993, and in 1999 Hasbro announced an updated Q*bert among its revivals of old arcade games. In 2012 Q*bert, Coily and the other enemies appeared in Disney’s animated film Wreck-It Ralph, as homeless characters whose game had gone. Lee’s one regret was the asterisk: it was a wildcard in computer searches, and it kept Q*bert out of crosswords, though the New York Times managed it in 2007.
Sources
- Neil Tesser, “The Life and Times of Q*bert & Joust”, Video Games vol. 1 no. 7, April 1983, pp. 26–29: the AMOA show in November 1982; Gottlieb’s first three video games; unfilled orders and Parker Brothers’ rights; the anonymous team (“D.”, “R.”, “J.”); Rubin’s quotations; the voice chip and the sound designer’s quotation; the cast of characters.
- Doug Mahugh, “Q*bert”, JoyStik vol. 1 no. 5, April 1983, pp. 33–36: 28 cubes, the characters, the discs and scoring, the levels, and the quotation about the speech.
- Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated, July 1983, p. 67: Reactor and Q-Bert’s difficulty curve; “greatest success so far”.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 14, April 1983, p. 55: Parker Brothers had “snapped up” the home rights.
- Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 9, November 1983, pp. 114–116, “Q*Bert Comes Home”: the merchandise.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 11, August 1983, p. 9, and Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 10, December 1983, p. 10: Saturday Supercade on CBS and “Q*Bert High”.
- Parker Brothers advertisement, Family Computing vol. 1 no. 4, December 1983, p. 161: the home formats.
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 1, January 1985, p. 14: the closure of Mylstar Electronics (formerly Gottlieb).
- “The Making Of: Q*bert”, Retro Gamer issue 54, 2008, pp. 70–73: interviews with Davis and Lee (Yabumoto’s cubes; Lee’s character; Waxman’s idea; the diagonal controls; the phonemes and the two English phrases; “@!#?@!” and the test under that name; the name; Tighe’s knocker; the merchandise and the royalty scheme; Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert and Q*bert’s Qubes; the ColecoVision version; the asterisk).
- “Warren Davis”, Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005, pp. 76–77: Bell Labs, the newspaper advertisement, Thiel’s speech, the 25,000 cabinets.
- “The making of… Q*bert”, Edge issue 132, January 2004, pp. 114–117: Davis as the only programmer and Lee as Gottlieb’s only artist; the nose weapon; Waxman; making it easier; the knocker.
- Game Informer issue 4, March 1992, p. 47: the Game Boy Q*bert, and the earlier “Nintendo cart of the same name”.
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 4, January 1993, pp. 102–104: Q*bert 3 on the Super NES.
- Computer and Video Games issue 215, October 1999, p. 88: Hasbro updating Q*bert.
- Retro Gamer issue 105, August 2012, p. 9, and issue 119, 2013, pp. 21–27: Q*bert in Wreck-It Ralph.