Pengo review: the penguin who fights with the floor

A little red penguin stands in a field of ice blocks. Blob creatures called Sno-Bees hatch and come looking for him. He has no gun, no power pill, no bomb. He has his shoulder and a lot of ice. Pengo is a game about using the room itself as the weapon, and it is still a joy to figure out.

The maze is the weapon

The controls are a four-position joystick and a single button. Push against a block and press the button, and the block slides until it hits another block or a wall. If something is in the way, Pengo crushes the block instead. That is it, and it is enough. A good slide down a long lane can flatten a Sno-Bee from across the screen, and a great one takes out two at once.

Every push also changes the board. The block you slid is now somewhere else, the lane is open, and the Sno-Bees have a new path to you. You are building and breaking the maze as you play.

The best move in Pengo is the one that fixes the board and the enemy at the same time.

The wall shake and the diamonds

When things get tight, you can push against the outer wall. It vibrates and stuns any Sno-Bees in contact with it, and a stunned Sno-Bee can simply be walked over. It is a panic button with a cost, because you have to be at the edge to use it, and the edge is a bad place to be.

Then there are the three diamond blocks. They cannot be crushed, and lining them up earns a big bonus. Chasing that line while the Sno-Bees crush blocks to reach you is the moment Pengo stops being cute.

The music you already knew

The first version of the arcade game played "Popcorn" as its theme, the synth tune a lot of Americans had heard somewhere without knowing the name. A later version swapped in original music. Either way, Computer and Video Games called it "the cutest of coin-operated video games," and it was hard to argue.

What it meant back then

Pengo was the cabinet you noticed in a pizza parlor because it did not look like war. No spaceships, no explosions, a penguin on a blue field. It drew kids who were a little too young for the shooters and older players who liked a puzzle, and a quarter in Pengo lasted as long as your head held out, not your reflexes. In the corner of a roller rink or a mall arcade, that made it a sneaky favorite.

Playing it today

It holds up beautifully, because the design is honest. You can see every block and every enemy, and every loss is a push you should not have made. Give it ten minutes and you will start setting up slides two moves in advance. That is when you realize how much thinking this penguin was asking for.