Dig Dug review: you draw the maze, then you fight in it

Most maze games of the time handed you a finished maze. Dig Dug hands you a screen full of dirt. Wherever you walk, a tunnel opens behind you. The monsters are down there too, and the tunnels you dig become the paths they use to reach you.

The maze is your fault

Namco sold it as a "strategic digging game," and the strategy really is in the digging. The team wanted mazes shaped by the player rather than the fixed corridors of Pac-Man. So the question is never only where the enemies are. It is what shape of tunnel you want them to come down.

A long straight tunnel lines them up. A tunnel dug under a rock sets up a trap. A careless tunnel hands them a shortcut to your back.

Pump or rock

You have two ways to win a fight. The first is the air pump: hook an enemy and keep pressing until it inflates and bursts. It is funny and a little grim, and it has a price, because Dig Dug stops moving while he pumps. If a second monster is coming down the tunnel, you are stuck in place with your hands full.

The second is the rock. Dig out the dirt under a boulder, step aside, and it drops. Catch more than one enemy under it and you score a bonus. Rocks reward setting things up ahead of time instead of reacting, and that is the real lesson of the game.

The enemies are Pookas, round red things in oversized goggles, and Fygars, little dragons that breathe fire. They cheat in a charming way: they can drift through solid dirt as a pair of ghostly eyes and reappear in your tunnel. When only one is left, it tries to escape off the edge of the screen, and you are suddenly the one doing the chasing.

In Dig Dug you draw the maze yourself, so every bad tunnel has your name on it.

What it meant back then

In America the game came out through Atari, Inc., and it sat on the cheerful side of the room. Between the war machines and space shooters at the mall, here was a little digger with a pump and a bouncing tune. That tune has a story. The composer, Yuriko Keino, could not make a convincing footstep sound, so she wrote a short melody instead. Once you heard it over the noise of a pizza parlor, you could pick it out anywhere.

It was also a game you could hand to a younger brother or sister without an argument. The enemies look silly, and the idea of digging needs no explanation at all.

Playing it now

Dig Dug rewards planning more than reflexes, and it still feels fresh because of that. Play it the way it asks: dig with a purpose, drop rocks on groups, and save the pump for when you have a clear line. Once you stop reacting and start building traps, it turns into a quiet, satisfying puzzle with a shovel.