Dig Dug

Dig Dug is a maze video game where the player controls the titular protagonist, Dig Dug (Taizo Hori), to eliminate each stage's enemies: Pookas, red and spherical beings that wear comically large goggles; and the draconic Fygars, which breathe fire. Dig Dug can use an air pump to inflate them until they explode or crush them to death under falling rocks. When the air pump is activated, Dig Dug will stop moving and throw the end of the air pump forwards, where it may catch onto an enemy. If an enemy is hit, they are frozen in place and the player can repeatedly press the air pump's button to inflate them.

If no action is taken for a while or the player moves, the air pump disconnects and the action is cancelled, but the enemy will begin to deflate and will be stunned until fully deflated. Rocks are unable to be dug through but will fall after a short period of time after the tile directly beneath them is removed by Dig Dug and he moves from the position, though he can still be crushed. Falling rocks are destroyed once they land on a tile. Bonus points are awarded for squashing multiple enemies with a single rock and dropping any pair of rocks in a stage yields a bonus item, which can be eaten for points, and increases its point value the further the player gets in the game.

Dig Dug was planned and designed in 1981 by Masahisa Ikegami, with help from Shigeru Yokoyama, creator of Galaga. The game was programmed for the Namco Galaga arcade system board by Shigeichi Ishimura, a Namco hardware engineer, and the late Shouichi Fukatani, along with Toshio Sakai. Other staff members were primarily colleagues of Shigeru Yokoyama. Yuriko Keino composed the soundtrack, as her first video game project.

Tasked with making Dig Dug's movement sound, she could not make a realistic stepping sound, so she instead made a short melody. Hiroshi "Mr. Dotman" Ono, a Namco graphic artist, designed the sprites.

Dig Dug was a critical and commercial success upon release, and was praised for its gameplay and layered strategy. In Japan, it was the second highest-grossing arcade game of 1982, behind Namco's own Pole Position. In North America, Atari sold 22,228 Dig Dug arcade cabinets by the end of 1982, earning $46,300,000 (equivalent to $154,000,000 in 2025) in sales. Around July 1983, it was one of the six top-grossing games. The 2004 Famicom Mini release had 58,572 copies sold, and the Xbox Live Arcade version had 222,240 copies by 2011.

American publication Blip Magazine favorably compared it to games such as Pac-Man for its simple controls and fun gameplay. AllGame called it "an arcade and NES classic", praising its characters, gameplay, and unique premise, and for its easy home platform conversion. In 1998, Japanese magazine Gamest called it one of the greatest arcade games of all time for its addictiveness and for breaking the traditional "dot-eater" gameplay used in games such as Pac-Man and Rally-X. In a 2007 retrospective, Eurogamer praised its "perfect" gameplay and strategy, saying it is one of "the most memorable and legendary videogame releases of the past 30 years". The Killer List of Videogames rated it the sixth-most-popular coin-op game of all time.

Dig Dug prompted a fad of "digging games". Clones include the arcade game Zig Zag (1982), the Atari 8-bit computer game Anteater (1982) by Romox, Merlin's Pixie Pete, Victory's Cave Kooks (1983) for the Commodore 64, and Saguaro's Pumpman (1984) for the TRS-80 Color Computer. The most successful is Universal Entertainment's arcade game Mr. Do!

(1982), released about six months later and surpassing clone status. Sega's Borderline (1981), when it was ported to the Atari 2600 as Thunderground in 1983, was mistaken as a "semi-clone" of Dig Dug and Mr. Do! Boulder Dash (1984) also drew comparisons to Dig Dug.