face worker, a serpentine miner

My twenty-five year love affair with Dig Dug began, as many love affairs do, in the dark alcove of a Howard Johnson’s off Interstate 90.

Every summer, my maternal grandparents would take my brother and I with them on vacation, although perhaps “vacation” isn’t the correct word to describe these trips. My grandfather was a very kind, generous man, but he was also something of an odd duck. His idea of a vacation was to gather up everyone into his gigantic sedan and drive to a set point, be it a motel parking lot in Asheville, North Carolina or a plot of swampland he owned in north central Maine, then immediately drive back home (except in the case of the Maine trips, where he’d stop in to visit family and putter amongst the blackflies and mudholes for a couple hours).

Whenever we had to make a rest stop or the occasional visit to a roadside tourist trap or strip mall, my grandfather would park in the furthest corner of the lot and send my grandmother, brother and me in to do our business while he sat in the car. This being the early 1980’s, there were arcade machines everywhere, and I could always count on scoring a couple of quarters from my grandmother in order to keep me busy while she tried to keep my grandfather’s deliberately complicated food order straight, lest he fly into paroxyms of rage over finding too much relish on his overpriced hamburger. (She never succeeded, nor did my grandfather ever want her to, I suspect.)

It was during one of these stops that I played my first game of Dig Dug, and it was a case of love at first sight. The graphics were amazingly colorful and detailed in comparison to the minimalist black backgrounds in vogue at the time, and the dig-your-own maze aspect (“free roaming gameplay” circa 1982) felt like a quantum leap over the preset environments of other entries in the maze game genre. The ability to actively manipulate the environment of the playfield, along with the directly-controllable ability to stun or kill persuing Pookas (tomatoes with ski goggles) or Frygars (fire-breathing green dragons) with your in-game avatar’s air-pump weapon, encouraged a level of creative gameplay that contrasted sharply to the rote pattern recognition skills required to master a game like Pac-Man.

I spent the years following that fateful encounter practicing my tunneling and monster squashing/bursting skills whenever the opportunity arose. If I wasn't biking to the nearest arcade (five miles away, by the train depot in Wilmington), I was sneaking away from my Cub Scout pack at Canobie Lake and making a bee line for the secondary arcade (next to the fake rocketship that would play clips from Journey to the Prehistoric Planet while the operator banged the hull with a stick to add drama) where the amusement park kept the older, less popular arcade machines in search of a Dig Dug fix.

While I've cast off many (but not all, not hardly) childish things over the years, my affection for Dig Dug has remained constant. It's simple yet elegant gameplay and visuals have not lost their capacity to entertain me, and it makes a great de-stresser and mental palate cleanser whenever the need for either arises.

Plus, there’s a certain visceral thrill to be had in luring a conga line of enemies to a squishy doom via falling boulder. Some things never go out of style.

Here’s a medley of the incidental music and sounds from Dig Dug.

Chaos UK – Pump It Up (from Heard It, Seen It, Done It, 1997) – Thank you, Chaos UK, for sparing me the indignity of having to post the Elvis Costello original version.

The Jam – Going Underground (from a 1980 single, collected on Snap! 1983) – I have the same reaction to The Jam that I do to Strawberry Pop Tarts. I love them occasionally in small doses, but there is a clearly defined limit to my tolerance, past which the love quickly transmogrifies into nausea.

Lush – Outdoor Miner (from the For Love EP, 1992) – I debated going with Wire’s original version of this song, but ultimately decided in favor of something a little more obscure. Besides, we all could benefit from a little more Lush in our lives.