Mr. Do!

Mr. Do!
North American Flyer
Developer(s)	Universal
Publisher(s)	Taito
Designer(s)	Kazutoshi Ueda
Platform(s)	Arcade, Colecovision
Release date(s)	December 1982
Genre(s)	Maze
Mode(s)	Single Player
Cabinet	Upright, Cocktail
Arcade system	Main CPU: Z80 (@ 4 MHz) Sound Chips: 2x SN76496 (@ 4 MHz)
Display	Raster resolution 192×240 (Vertical) Palette Colors 256

Mr. Do! is an arcade game created by Universal in 1982.  Remotely similar in gameplay to Namco's popular Dig Dug title, Mr. Do! was also popular and saw release on a variety of home video game consoles and systems.  It is the first game in the Mr. Do series, and was released both as a standalone game and as a conversion kit (released by Taito Corp.) for existing arcade cabinets. It was the first arcade game to be released as a conversion kit, and went on to sell 30,000 units in the United States.^[1]

Game play

Screenshot from the game Mr. Do! (Mr. Do is on the right-hand side of the screen here)

The object of Mr. Do! is to score as many points as possible by digging tunnels through the ground and collecting cherries.  The title character, Mr. Do (a circus clown), is constantly chased by red monsters resembling small dinosaurs, and the player loses a life if Mr. Do is caught by one. The game is over when the last life is lost.

Cherries are distributed throughout the level in groups of eight.  500 bonus points are awarded if Mr. Do collects eight cherries in a row without stopping.  A level is complete when all cherries are removed, all monsters are destroyed, "EXTRA" is spelled, or a diamond is found.

Mr. Do can defeat the monsters by hitting them with his bouncing "power ball" or by dropping large apples on them.  While the power ball is bouncing toward a monster, Mr. Do is defenseless, leaving him vulnerable.  If the ball bounces into an area where there are no monsters to hit (such as behind a fallen apple), Mr. Do cannot use it again until he has retrieved it.  When the power ball hits a monster, it then reforms in Mr. Do's hands after a delay that increases with each use.

If an apple lands on a monster, or falls more than its own height, it breaks and disappears.  If an apple drops a short distance and does not break, Mr. Do or the red monsters can push it off the edge of a vertical tunnel and crush one or more monsters.  Mr. Do can also be crushed by a falling apple causing a loss of life.

Occasionally, the red monsters transform briefly into slower, more powerful multicolored monsters that can tunnel through the ground.  If one of these digs through a cherry, it leaves fewer cherries (and fewer points) for Mr. Do to collect.  When it digs under an apple, it often crushes itself, other red/blue monsters, and/or Mr. Do.

Each time the score passes a certain threshold during play (5000 points), a letter from the word "EXTRA" appears on the playfield as an Alphamonster, and the player can defeat or be defeated by this monster in the same way as a red monster.  Defeating an Alphamonster awards that letter to the player, and collecting all five letters of the word completes the level, plays a cut scene inexplicably playing the theme to Astro Boy, and awards the player an extra life.  Alphamonsters attempt to eat any apples they encounter, which makes them difficult (but not impossible) to crush.

The red monsters pop up from a generator at the center of the screen. After they have all appeared, the generator will turn into a food item; picking this up scores bonus points, freezes all the red monsters, and calls out an Alphamonster and three large blue monsters. The latter can eat apples as well. The red monsters stay frozen (but still deadly) until the player either defeats all three blue monsters, defeats the Alphamonster (in which case any remaining blue monsters are turned into apples), loses a life, or completes the stage.

Rarely, dropping an apple will reveal a diamond which, if collected within about 15 seconds, completes the level and awards a bonus credit to the player (as well as 8000 points), allowing him or her to play a free game.  (This feature is relatively uncommon among arcade video games, though it is a standard feature of many pinball machines.)

Ports and sequels

Neo Mr. Do!, the Mr. Do! Remake for the Neo-Geo.

Mr. Do!, like many games of its time, has been ported to a variety of computer systems and video game consoles, including the Atari 2600, several Atari 8-bit home computers, the ColecoVision, Apple II, MSX, Tomy Tutor and the Commodore 64 series of computers.  The game has also been adapted to more advanced systems, including Nintendo's Game Boy and Super NES (providing some new gameplay features), and a standalone handheld LCD adaptation was released by Tomy in 1983.  Each port offers varying differences in gameplay from the arcade version, the most common of which is the fact that the bonus credit awarded by the diamond has been removed.  The game has also seen numerous unauthorized clones released for various hardware platforms.

A completely new version of the game, Neo Mr. Do!, was released for SNK's Neo Geo system in 1996^[2].

There is also a scheduled release of the arcade version on the Wii Virtual Console released in Japan on April 27, 2010.^[3]

References

1. ^ Steve L. Kent (2001), The ultimate history of video games: from Pong to Pokémon and beyond : the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world, Prima, p. 352, ISBN 0761536434, "In 1982, Universal Sales made arcade history with a game called Mr Do! Instead of selling dedicated Mr Do! machines, Universal sold the game as a kit. The kit came with a customized control panel, a computer board with Mr Do! read-only memory (ROM) chips, stickers that could be placed on the side of stand-up arcade machines for art, and a plastic marquee. It was the first game ever sold as a conversion only. According to former Universal Sales western regional sales manager Joe Morici, the company sold approximately 30000 copies of the game in the United States alone." 
2. ^ "Neo Mr. Do! Review". neo-geo.com. http://www.neo-geo.com/reviews/neo-reviews/neomrdo/neomrdo.html. Retrieved 2008-05-09. 
3. ^ Virtual Console releases April 2010

External links and sources

• Mr. Do! at the Killer List of Videogames (retrieved February 9, 2005)
• Mr. Do! guide at StrategyWiki
• The Arcade Flyer Archive entry for Mr. Do!
• arcade-history.com entry on Mr. Do! (retrieved February 11, 2005)