XP Arcade: Dig Dug

Dig, crush, inflate, and don't get caught.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Dig Dug is such a perfect representation of the best of the golden age of arcade games. It has a simple premise, and you can get a few enjoyable minutes out of a single credit without understanding any of the deeper gameplay strategies, playing it pretty safe until things speed up to the point that you won’t advance without that knowledge and the skill to deploy it. You can also play again and again until your movement and decisions become more instinctual than strategy, in a desperate struggle to avoid losing a precious life that will see you digging up the vast majority of a map in order to avoid death and defeat a relatively small number of increasingly aggressive foes. The longer you play and more familiar you become with Dig Dug and its subtle intricacies, the more comfortable you can feel chasing score over survival, and the further up its leaderboards you’ll shoot.

It’s still a joy to play over 40 years after its release, and still compels you to try again in the same way it did when it first became a staple of arcades in 1982. Even with all of the advances made in video games in the decades since Namco’s classic “strategic digging” game launched, it’s easy to see how Dig Dug developed the following it did, both with players and with developers who found inspiration within it. And why Namco decided to go in a completely different direction for its first sequel, because what worlds were left to conquer that Dig Dug hadn’t already made its own the first time around?

Dig Dug spawned a genre that continues to this day: diggers. At the time, as with anything successful, there were a number of clones and games very openly borrowing ideas from it, the most well-remembered of which is Universal’s Mr. Do! In a 1989 discussion among Japanese game developers, Mr. Do!’s designer, Kazutoshi Ueda, explains that there was nothing subtle about the inspiration for the arcade game, saying, “I made that, and then quit Universal. Mr. Do was basically a clone of Dig Dug (obviously!). Management directly told us to copy the game. (laughs)” Mr. Do! reached arcades in September of 1982; Dig Dug had released in February of the same year. As Fukio Mitsuji, the creator of Bubble Bobble who led the discussion said, it’s not “just” a clone of Dig Dug, as it has its own gameplay elements, but it existed in the first place because Japanese developer Universal saw Dig Dug and its success and said, “hey, we need one of those.” Just like the developers behind Zig Zag, Pixie Pete, Pumpman, and the rest of the digger maze clones of the era; Mr. Do! just happened to be given an extra level of care that allowed it to succeed on its own merits, as well.

Dig Dug on Namco Museum Switch, viewed in its original vertical arcade orientation.

Dig Dug would be cited as a favorite for some prominent developers of the 80s, such as Yoshito Okamoto, who produced Street Fighter II and would later go on to found Flagship, the studio funded by Capcom, Sega, and Nintendo that co-developed a number of prominent Capcom properties like various Resident Evil titles of the day, and developed a few Zelda games including Oracle of Ages and Seasons, as well as Minish Cap. Okamoto was so impressed with Dig Dug (and Xevious) that he even said he tried to be hired by Namco, but “couldn’t get into their company” and ended up with Konami and then Capcom instead. That seems to have worked out alright.

Kotaro Hayashida, the designer behind Sega’s Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle as well as the scenario planner for Phantasy Star, cited Dug Dug as a personal favorite back in 1982 when it hit arcades and he was first looking for work in the industry. He wasn’t the only Sega developer to have the Dig Dug bug, either, as ALEX — in the 80s, you could just go by aliases like this and not show your face, you know — who also worked on Phantasy Star, cited Dig Dug as one of his favorites in an interview series called “I Made That!” which published in Famitsu Tsuushin magazine in 1991.

Dig Dug wasn’t a follow-up to worldwide smash hit Pac-Man, but it did build off of some of its ideas, at least. Or, more accurately, wanted explicitly to not be Pac-Man. In Pac-Man, the mazes were predetermined, and you followed the paths within these strict mazes in the hopes of avoiding being trapped within, and, as you became more skilled, to use the spaces within the maze as a trap against the ghosts sharing the space with and chasing you. Dig Dug, though, was about making the maze yourself: the maps were mostly solid, save the little bits where enemies were in place running back and forth, and you had to dig your way to those foes, to the rocks that could crush them if you do it right and crush you if you do it wrong, to any items that are there to be picked up. Which in turn meant that any dead ends in these mazes are your own doing, but so too are the traps you lay for your foes.

Over time, you could learn the layout of Pac-Man levels, where the items are, and so on, and play the stages in a specific way to continue to advance. It’s easier said than done, sure, but that’s how it works. In Dig Dug, though, the enemies are not restricted in their movement to the scope of the maze, and neither are you, since you’re the one creating it with your own movements. The enemies, of which there are two different types — the cute, red, goggle-sporting Pookas and the fire-breathing dragons, the Fygars — will follow along the path of the maze you make, but they might decide instead to float through the undug soil as a shortcut to reach you. The less soil exists around them, the more difficult it is for them to pull this off, but you can also use their ghostly floating to your advantage in a number of ways.

For instance, you can drop a rock right on their heads before they can move out of its way. Enemies move much slower in their floating form, which means they aren’t going to “see” what you’re up to and react fast enough to stop it like they could while running around:

That Pooka is going to end up squashed by a rock, which means it will be worth more points than if Dig Dug — yes, that was also the original name for this character — can inflate it, which is the more standard way of killing foes. Dig Dug throws a harpoon at his enemies, and the harpoon is attached to a pump, and a few pumps of it will inflate the enemy until they burst. Dig Dug is really, truly adorable until you realize you are bursting enemies to death when you aren’t killing them with loose boulders.

You can also use the pump to delay enemy advance — they’re stuck in place until they deflate — which will let you kind of juggle multiple foes coming at you — or you can walk right through an inflated enemy to make your escape from another chasing you in a different direction. As said, there are layers here to your approach, and you’ll want to figure out what all of them are to best defend yourself in any given situation.

If you time things right, you can draw a lot more aggro, as it were, than a single floating Pooka. Observe this clip from the Famicom version of Dig Dug, where the first rock drop is a miss because the Pooka hasn’t been drawn into the tunnel deep enough to be unable to avoid its crushing fate, but things turn around in a hurry when more than one enemy notices our digging hero and gives chase:

The rocks can fall through thinner layers of soil that haven’t been dug up yet, which means you can send rocks careening into the depths of the stages if you work all of this out beforehand. And since enemies defeated in lower levels of soil — indicated by the changes in color — are worth more points, it’s worth it to you to build deeper tunnels both for the points and so it’s more difficult for a Pooka or Fygar to run out of the way of the rock that’s hurtling toward them from above.

If you watched, you might have also noticed the garlic bulb (or onion; hey, it’s an 8-bit aromatic, that much is clear) that appeared after the rock dropped. Regardless of whether a fallen rock defeats an enemy or not, after two of them drop, a food item appears as a collectable item worth some points. Early foods aren’t worth much, a couple hundred points each, which is basically just like defeating a Pooka in a non-impressive way. Later, though, they’re worth a couple thousand points or more, and that’s no small thing in a game where the point totals aren’t particularly lofty, and it takes 20,000, then 40,000, then every 40,000 after that for an extend. That move above, with the multiple squashed enemies and the food pickup, was worth 13,000 points on its own. A couple of those results every now and again, and you’ll have extends to spare. Or, at least, a couple extra to tide you over for when enemies are moving too fast for your harpoon hand.

You move along an invisible grid in Dig Dug, which means you can't stop halfway through a "square" you're walking left or right through to go up or down instead (or go left and right while walking up or down, either). You have to make it to the next invisible square and then change direction. Enemies will catch you if you forget about that — especially as they speed up as you get deeper into the game — as you'll just stand there or change direction in a way you didn't mean to rather than change course as you wanted. It’s easy enough to “see” the grid, however, since each column and row is a rectangle separated only by a thin layer of soil that rocks can destroy, or you can dig up yourself by coming at it from more than one direction. You get used to it, and you’ll know you messed up before you even pay for it much of the time once you have.

Pac-Man isn’t the only classic Namco arcade game that Dig Dug has a connection to. It was programmed for the Namco Galaga board, which is how it ended up with its vertical orientation. The various console ports of Dig Dug had a horizontal orientation instead, which meant the playing field could be a little wider in some instances, but a layer of soil would often be cut out to account for the change in playing area. More modern ports of the arcade edition allow for you to change the display orientation instead. The embedded image above shows Dig Dug on Namco Museum Switch in its horizontal form, but this screenshot comes from the same version of the game, only in TATE mode, and shows two enemies being caught by one falling rock thanks to preemptively digging a path for that very outcome to occur:

If you’ve got the setup to play something vertically like this, and it was meant for that, you should! Hang a TV up on your wall using a rotating mount and thank me later. The sprites are larger, more of the screen’s real estate is dedicated to the playing area instead of screen borders… it’s as Masahisa Ikegami intended over 40 years ago now.

Ikemagi was the designer for Dig Dug, with an assist from Galaga designer and creator Shigeru Yokoyama. It was also the first Namco project for composer Yuriko Keino, who would go on to compose the music for so many of Namco’s fantastic 80s arcade offerings like Xevious, Pole Position and its sequel, and Dragon Buster. Dig Dug’s contribution to video game music is significant, as it was one of the first titles to have dynamic audio: the music played when you moved your character, and it stopped when he did. This occurred because the original plan for Dig Dug was to make a stepping sound when the character moved, but it was difficult to create: instead, a song was written in place of footsteps, and it would play whenever Dig Dug was walking.

This might not sound huge, but consider that just four years prior, in the days before dedicated sound chips, Space Invaders had become the first game with in-level music of any kind, made up of just four repeating notes (Karen Collins, Game Sound, p. 12). Pac-Man’s music (1980) only played in between stages, as did Galaga’s (1981), and Dig Dug released just two years after Namco’s own Rally-X, which was the first game with continuous, melodic music during its stages instead of just a jingle in between them. A continuous, melodic song that was also dynamic audio that responded to the player’s actions? That was a huge step for video game music!

It was dynamic in other ways, as well. If you took too long in a stage — which you might find yourself doing often, since you score points for every square of soil you dig up and not just the enemies you defeat — the music changes and speeds up to reflect the fact that the enemies are now moving more swiftly after you. (If you play the embedded video, you’ll actually hear the transition happen.) You are still in control of whether the music plays at all based on Dig Dug’s movements, but when it does play, it’s far more frantic.

As happened with successful arcade games, Dig Dug ended up ported to pretty much anywhere it could be. The Famicom port is excellent — the color palette is limited in comparison to what the Namco Galaga board could produce, sure, and the horizontal orientation means there’s a layer of soil missing, but it’s still an excellent way to experience Dig Dug, especially since the enemies are a bit faster, quicker in the game. The Game Boy port is fine, but far from ideal, since you have a harder time seeing the big picture of a stage at the zoomed in resolution it plays at, and movement doesn’t feel nearly as good as it does in the arcade or Famicom editions.

Dig Dug was ported to far more platforms than that, though, so many, in fact, that Hardcore Gaming 101’s Namco Arcade Classics digest has what is basically a two-page spread of screenshot comparisons across versions, featuring [inhales] arcade, Famicom, Atari 8-bit, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Commodore 64, MSX, PC6001, PC88, PC88SR, PC80, MZ1500, Sord M5, PV1000, Sharp X1, Apple II, ColecoVision, Intellivision, TI-99/4A, VIC-20, and IBM PC.

In addition to all of these ports, Dig Dug also has an Arrangement version that Namco released into arcades as part of a series of Namco Classics Collection compilations, and a second arrangement of the same name that’s actually completely different and sometimes known as “Remix,” this one on the Playstation Portable and Xbox 360. These games have different graphics — the ones on the Xbox 360 don’t look all that great, to be honest, in a way that makes it pretty clear sprites are superior for Dig Dug design — and introduce new enemy types, items, and are built from the ground up for horizontal orientation. The new enemies are great for making Dig Dug Arrangement justify its existence, as you have things like an ant that also can dig, ripping some of your maze-designing powers away from you if you don’t take care of it fast enough, and boulders that will fall in more directions than just straight down, allowing you to create a rolling ball of death, or crush yourself in new and even more embarrassing ways if you aren’t careful around them.

The items are also nifty, since you can hold on to power-up cards (four at a time) that do things like enhance your dig speed, your walking speed, or how powerful your pump is. The bosses are just large versions of enemies you’re used to facing, with standard enemies swarming around trying to keep you from pumping the bosses up enough to burst them. It obviously takes more pumping to get the big guys to blow, which is where the strategy is, especially with all the little ones running around in stages with less maze design possible given the size of the bosses in question.

That arrangement is tough to find, since it exists on the PSP’s Namco Battle Collection and Xbox 360’s Namco Museum Virtual Arcade, and that’s it: Dig Dug Arrangement has long been delisted from the 360’s digital shop, so a physical copy of Virtual Arcade is the lone way to access it if you don’t already own it. The original Dig Dug, though, is much more common. It’s a staple of Namco Museum releases, first appearing on Namco Museum Vol. 3 for the Playstation in 1997, as well as on Namco Museum for the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and Game Boy Advance (while also including the 1996 arcade arrangement). Dig Dug was on Namco Museum 50th Anniversary in 2005, which released on basically every platform of the time, then both Namco Museum Remix and Namco Museum Megamix for the Wii, and Namco Museum Essentials as a (now delisted) digital purchase for the Playstation 3. In the present, it’s available on Namco Museum for Switch, received an Arcade Archives release through Hamster for the Switch and Playstation 4, while its Famicom port is also on both systems through Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1.

And while Dig Dug itself hasn’t seen a huge number of sequels of late and seems mostly to be in re-release mode, its influence is still felt: the digging genre still exists, with series like Shovel Knight putting the character’s titular tool to good use in a digging game in the fall of 2022 with Shovel Knight Dig, and there were multiple SteamWorld Dig releases in the past decade. Namco itself (well, Bandai Namco, now) has Mr. Driller as a digging series these days, which is actually connected to Dig Dug: the protagonist of the former is the son of the protagonist of the latter, whose name was revealed in Mr. Driller to not be Dig Dug, but Taizo Hori. And Hori showed up in Namco x Capcom as a playable character, because that’s exactly what that series of beautiful games is for. And yes, he looks sick as hell there:

Even if the fate of Dig Dug is to be released again and again on new systems, rather than with any new entries in the series, that’s fine. The original is over 40 years old, and it’s still wondrous, still addicting, still a joy to play and discover the secrets of. Not everything needs to be iterated on forever, or made new again: just continue to give us access to the wonders of the past, like Namco does so well with games like Dig Dug, and there will be plenty of happiness and history to discover for anyone searching for them.

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