Q*bert

Qbert is a fixed-screen action game with puzzle elements in which the player guides the title character across a pyramid of 28 cubes. Qbert moves by hopping diagonally from one cube to another, changing the color of each cube he lands upon. A round is completed when every cube has been changed to the indicated target color. Jumping beyond the edge of the pyramid instead of onto a floating disk costs one of the player’s lives.

Each level consists of four rounds with progressively more complicated color-changing rules. During the first level, each cube reaches its target color after a single landing. The second requires cubes to be changed through an intermediate color, usually requiring two visits. From the third level onward, every landing changes a cube again, including those that have already reached the target color, forcing the player to plan routes more carefully and avoid undoing earlier progress.

Several creatures interfere with the task. Red balls bounce down the pyramid and kill Qbert on contact. Purple balls eventually hatch into Coily, a snake that actively pursues him. Ugg and Wrong-Way travel along the exposed sides of the cubes according to their own interpretation of the pyramid’s geometry, while Slick and Sam descend across their upper surfaces and reverse completed color changes. Qbert can safely catch Slick and Sam for bonus points. Green balls temporarily freeze every other creature on the screen while leaving Qbert free to move.

Multicolored disks float beside selected edges of the pyramid. Jumping onto one carries Qbert back to the top and removes the disk for the remainder of the round. If Coily follows him over the edge, the snake falls from the pyramid and every other active creature is cleared from the screen. Unused disks provide bonus points when the round is completed.

Points are awarded for changing cubes, catching beneficial creatures, defeating Coily, preserving disks, and completing rounds. The completion bonus increases during the earlier levels, while enemies appear in increasingly dangerous combinations and move more quickly as the game progresses. The arcade version supports one or two players, with two participants alternating turns.

The arcade release is the original version. The Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit conversions are nearly identical apart from their control methods: the Atari computer version recommends rotating the joystick diagonally, while the Atari 5200 edition requires the fire button to be held while selecting a direction to compensate for its non-centering controller. The ColecoVision and Commodore 64 editions closely reproduce the pyramid, principal enemies, color rules, disks, and audiovisual presentation. The Atari 2600 version is more heavily simplified, using a flatter-looking pyramid and omitting Ugg, Wrong-Way, and Slick.

The Intellivision, Odyssey 2, SG-1000, TI-99/4A, VIC-20, and DOS editions retain the same basic objective while simplifying or redrawing the graphics, animation, sound, controls, and number or behavior of enemies for their respective hardware. The dedicated tabletop version uses a self-contained vacuum-fluorescent display and reduces the action to suit its fixed electronic playfield.

The NES version contains nine levels of four rounds each and permits the player to continue from the beginning of the current level a limited number of times. The Game Boy adaptation expands the game to 64 rounds divided among 16 levels, introduces several new playfield arrangements, enemies, and bonus items, and presents one segment of “Qbert: The Movie” after each completed level. It also allows a choice between diagonal and straight directional controls.

The Mophun, J2ME, and BlackBerry versions adapt the arcade design to mobile-phone screens and directional keypads. The 2007 PlayStation 3 release is a high-definition recreation with optional Sixaxis motion controls and worldwide online score rankings rather than a direct emulation of one of the earlier home conversions.