Mr. Do! review: the clown who dug his own maze

A circus clown stands in a field of dirt with cherries buried in it. Red monsters come out of the middle of the screen. You dig. They follow your tunnels. Big apples sit on top of the dirt, waiting for someone to dig under them. Mr. Do! is a game where the map is yours to make, and the map will absolutely be used against you.

Every tunnel is a road for them too

The creeps chase you through the tunnels you carve, so your digging is always half attack and half trap. Dig a long straight lane and you get a fast escape route, but so do they. Dig in a tight zigzag and you slow them down, but you slow yourself too. The game never tells you which is right.

The apples are where it gets clever. Push one off the edge of a tunnel and it drops onto whatever is below, creeps included. It can crush you too, which keeps you honest about where you stand. A careful player spends as much time setting up apples as collecting anything.

Mr. Do! is a game about building the maze you deserve.

The ball that makes you wait

Your weapon is a bouncing power ball. Throw it and it ricochets down the tunnels toward a creep. While it is out, you are defenseless. When it hits, it comes back to your hands after a delay that gets longer each time you use it. So every throw is a small bet, and later in a round you think hard before you let it go.

The idea came from something ordinary. Kazutoshi Ueda saw a Super Ball stuck on the roof of a house near the Universal office, and it turned into the most memorable weapon in the game.

Cherries, letters and a lot of ways to win

Cherries are laid out in groups of eight, and eating a group without stopping pays a bonus. You can also clear a round by wiping out every creep, or by spelling EXTRA with letters carried by special monsters. Having several ways to finish a level means two players watching the same round will tell you two different stories about how it should have gone.

What it meant back then

Mr. Do! was the first arcade game sold as a conversion kit, which mattered on an American arcade floor. It meant an operator could turn a tired cabinet into a new game, so Mr. Do! could turn up in a machine that used to be something else, at the pizza place, the laundromat, the convenience store. You would put your quarter in a cabinet you thought you knew and find a clown looking back at you. It was inspired by Namco's Dig Dug, and the family resemblance is easy to see.

Playing it today

It is busier than Dig Dug and more forgiving in how it lets you win, which makes it great for beginners and deep for anyone who sticks around. Play three rounds and you will already have an opinion about apples. That is the sign of a design with real choices in it.