Retro spotlight: Mr. Driller
No, no, I'm Mr. Driller. Dig Dug was my dad.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Mr. Driller has a fascinating backstory. Not the game or games itself, necessarily, but the creation of the series in general. It was designed by Yasuhito Nagaoka, who had worked on the Ridge Racer series as a designer, and would later go on to Sony as the Lead Action System Designer for the perpetually underrated Gravity Rush. Mr. Driller wasn’t initially planned to be an arcade game, since by the late-90s the arcade scene had come to be overrun with fighting games, but when Hideo Yoshizawa joined the project — Yoshizawa being the developer at Namco behind Klonoa — those plans changed, and it went from console-exclusive to arcade debut. Mr. Driller, as it was renamed during development as it disconnected itself, temporarily, from the Dig Dug franchise, was also made before it was approved by anyone else at Namco, and so then it was presented, as a finished product, to the chairman of the company instead of moving up the chain through the normal channels that get games approved.
It’s not a surprise that Yoshizawa would be drawn to Nagaoka’s unfinished project. This is the same designer whose ethos behind Klonoa was that two buttons is all you need; in Mr. Driller, you just need the one. Point where you want to drill with the joystick/analog stick/D-pad, and then press a button to drill. It’s as simple as that. But not really quite that simple, either, as your actions have consequences in Mr. Driller. Dig and dig, and the ceiling is bound to start caving in. Which is fine, unless you’re under said cave-in when it lands. This, too, sounds easy to avoid, but if it were that easy, then there wouldn’t be much fun to be had in Mr. Driller, would there? And Mr. Driller is nothing but fun.
The reason for the switch to arcades was in order to build up some buzz for Mr. Driller, as Yoshizawa explained to Jeremy Parish at 1Up: “But when it was first going to be released on the console, I didn't think it would become very popular or that the buzz would grow too much. At first, I wanted to build up some popularity before putting it out on the console, so I asked a co-worker in the arcade division to release it in the arcades first.” Explaining why the game is fun and enjoyable is a little difficult whether you’re talking to a friend or tasked with marketing it on its box or in a magazine, but if you had seen it in arcades, back at a time when “seeing a game in the arcade” was a thing that happened regularly and resulted in home ports, you’d get it. And then get it, as it were. The plan worked, too, as Mr. Driller succeeded enough in arcades that it didn’t just get a home conversion, but was ported pretty much everywhere.
The Playstation was the most successful system Mr. Driller landed on, but it kept being ported for years after its initial release, too. A worldwide arcade release in 1999, then the Playstation, Dreamcast, and Game Boy Color in 2000, followed by the WonderSwan Color in 2004, a mobile phone port in 2004, and iOS in 2009. It probably would have been ported to even more systems, but Namco started up the sequel machine to build on this strong foundation and make a series out of things. The central shape of Mr. Driller’s gameplay has persisted through the years of those sequels. There were changes, sure, and new modes were added over time to help transition Mr. Driller from a $20 budget game hopping over from arcades into something bigger with a little more staying power per release. But it’s Mr. Driller, always, to the point that even in something as robust and varied as 2002’s GameCube joint, Mr. Driller: Drill Land, the basic multiplayer match-up is just a recreation of the original Mr. Driller level design, only now competitive.
Needing “more staying power” isn’t a knock on the original release of Mr. Driller, either. There was room to grow, but plenty of enjoyment to be had with what was there from the start. You had the standard mode, where you attempted to descend to depths of 2,500 feet or 5,000 feet, with the former broken up into five different sections, and the latter 10. (In the Japanese releases such as for WonderSwan Color, it’s 500 meters and 1,000 meters instead, but the actual gameplay is the same regardless of the numbers used.) Each of those sections worked a little bit different, with some more difficult due to their structure, some a little easier on purpose to let you catch your breath a bit (or maybe get a little too relaxed and die in the middle of said breath), and plenty in between those extremes. In each, the basic play is the same: you can dig down, up, to the left, or to the right, and you’re going to try to tunnel yourself to the bottom before running out of air or being crushed to death by falling blocks.
You have a tank of air, which depletes as you play, and you can refill it with air tanks scattered across the playing area. Each tank refills 20 percent of your air, which sounds like quite a bit, and is early on. As you delve deeper, though, the air tanks are fewer and further between, and the ones you do find are more difficult to get to. At the start, air tanks are just out there, easily grabbed when you drill through the block next to them, but then you have to start climbing up one layer of blocks to reach them because of the way the blocks in the way are oriented, and after that, the tanks are completely surrounded by “X” blocks, which actually take 20 percent of your air if you drill through them. Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but you never really want to have to do that, considering the cost.
The solution is to cause a bunch of X blocks to fall down and merge into each other, which will cause them to disappear and leave the air tank there for the taking. Easier said than done, sometimes, since, the rules for these blocks are different in other ways. When you drill one of the four colored blocks — blue, red, green, and yellow — all blocks of the same color that are touching the one you drilled will also vanish. Which can cause some real chain reactions, when the number of single-square blocks touching each other has made for one massive block of a single color, or even if some tiny blocks being removed causes the whole structure to become unstable and start falling, potentially creating more large blocks and matches that automatically vanish due to your actions. Or, you know, it can fall on your head and kill you if you aren’t careful.
The X blocks don’t operate this way, since, even if they’re touching other X blocks, only the one you drill through will vanish. If you can cause them to fall and land in a large enough group all touching, however, they’ll vanish just like standard blocks. You’ll probably have this occur more due to luck at first than anything, but with enough reps put in, you’ll see these opportunities and take advantage of them. It’s that or run out of air in the deep.
Susumu will be crushed by blocks that land on him, but if he’s not fully under the landing spot — if it’s less than half of his body in the space a block is landing on — he’ll simply get knocked aside and temporarily stunned. Which can also kill you, if more blocks are falling from above in the spot you’re not briefly stuck in, but it does at least give you a chance to reorient yourself and figure out a new path or next step to take. It’s a little too easy to get greedy and ruin your life here, since you can have these skin-of-your-teeth escapes and get away with a lot of actions it feels like you shouldn’t be able to. But you need to take some risks if you’re going to make it before you run out of air, too.
The air tanks aren’t just full of air, but also points. The first one you collect is worth 100 points, the second 200, the third 300, and so on: in a game where eliminating single blocks doesn’t make your score go up all that quickly, it’s bonuses like this that help make the difference in your final tally. Big combos and having lives leftover are the real sources of points, however: for each remaining life when you reach the bottom, you’ll receive 30,000 points, and additional points from a time bonus based on how long it took you to get there.
It’s all basic, but it’s not something you’re going to immediately master, either, not when there are all these little considerations and nuances designed to add depth and also kill you. In addition to the standard mode, the home conversions all included a Time Attack mode that saw you trying to get to the bottom as fast as possible, with clocks to pick up that reduce your logged time, and a Survival mode where you’re just drilling until you die. The only real bummer is that Mr. Driller is single-player in its original form, but you can also take turns and compare scores, too, since the game lets you input a name and keeps track of these things for you. It’s not quite as thrilling as competitive 1v1 multiplayer, sure, but that would come later, at least.
Mr. Driller wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable if it was just about drilling as fast as you can to the bottom. It is about that, in part, but you need to be discerning about some of the drilling. You can’t always escape falling blocks by drilling faster than gravity works, and sometimes you need to know exactly when to change course, to dig a block to the left so you can duck over there, briefly, and then drill back to your right in order to avoid the blocks that are newly falling. You get all of one full second of watching a block teetering before it comes down, so you always know what’s coming next, and can plot out the movement you need to take to avoid what’s coming down in the next few seconds. But you need to do this part quickly, because again, we’re talking about just a few seconds, even if it feels like longer when you’re at the point where you can slow it all down in your mind.
While the initial connection to Dig Dug was severed, it would come back at a later date. The protagonist of Dig Dug, Taizo Hori, was made into Susumu’s father, and he’d later join in on the Mr. Driller fun as kind of a weird old single dad other characters roll their eyes at, who was divorced from Masuyo “Kissy” Tobi, the protagonist of another 80s Namco title, Baraduke. Like with Taizo, you can find Kissy in Mr. Driller titles, though not as a playable character. Namco has a little universe of characters, it’s true, but don’t take it too seriously: per Yoshizawa, Masuyo Tobi was chosen as Susumu’s mom and Taizo’s ex-wife mostly because, “One of the staff just thought the plot would be funny.” Sometimes, that’s all you need.
While Mr. Driller hasn’t seen a lot of modern-day re-releases, it does show up on occasion. Sony included it in the Playstation Classic as one of the 20 pre-loaded games, which… listen, they didn’t make the best decisions when curating that list, considering the Playstation’s juggernaut of a catalog, but Mr. Driller was a good one. It’s also available on the Playstation 3’s digital storefront for all of $10, and you can pick it up on the Playstation 4 or Playstation 5 for the same, and with a lot less effort than it takes to buy something on the PS3 in 2024. Each of the ports is great and also the same thing, other than some graphical fidelity differences between, say, the Dreamcast edition and the WonderSwan Color one, since we’re talking a 128-bit platform against an 8-bit one. But the smaller resolution of the WonderSwan Color (and Game Boy Color) does an excellent job of hiding these differences, too, so they all still look bright and colorful, all move at the pace you’d expect, and no compromises were made for game speed or rhythm.
The only complaint to make about any of the ports, really, is that the WonderSwan Color one could have taken advantage of the system’s screen rotation for a vertically oriented mode that showed off more of the playing area than the horizontal view does, but that’s (1) not a necessity, just a thought and (2) the game was designed with horizontal orientations in mind from the start, and so was ported that way, too. If they had gone a little deeper with the conversion in order to tailor it a little more specific to each system, however, that would have been a move to make. Ah, well, it’s still great on the WonderSwan Color regardless, and with its colors, a showcase for that system and screen.
If you’ve never played Mr. Driller before, it’s really something. A taste of that 1980s Namco arcade glory, where a simple concept could become replayable fun, only released after those days that built the company into what they’d become. And it was never even supposed to be that kind of game, either! It got its start in arcades, though, grabbed the kind of buzz it needed to stand out in the home space, and now we’re 13 games and one remake into the series over two decades later.
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