Q*bert

1001 Video Games

The Arcade version of Q*Bert appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Board game adaption

In 1983 a board game adaptation of Q*bert was released, challenging one player to activate as many pyramid tiles as die rolls permit while a second player directs the movements of his antagonists.

Cancelled versions

• A Famicom version of Q*Bert was announced, but cancelled.
• Six months after release, Davis developed a update called Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert which ramped up the difficulty because he felt the original became too easy. It was not released because it was seen as too similar and too near to the first version. Sometime in the 1990s he released for free through the MAME emulator.

References to the game

• Q*bert is referenced in the Futurama episode Anthology of Interest II. The episode consists of three shorts; one of which involves Fry asking the "what-if" machine "what if life was more like a video game." Q*bert is one of the aliens that invades Earth. He comes out of one of the Invaders.
• Q*bert is referenced in a flashback in a Family Guy episode. Stewie first says that a certain incident was worse than being Q*bert's roommate, where it then cuts to Stewie laying in the middle of the pyramid asleep with Q*bert jumping down turning on the tiles. Stewie then wakes up and says "It's all night with the lights, listen if you're gonna keep this up I'm not splitting the electric bill".
• A Q*bert arcade machine is seen in Ghostbusters: The Video Game on the second floor of the firehouse. Sadly, the game is not playable.

TV Cartoon

Q*Bert was popular enough to have a Saturday morning TV cartoon based on it in the early 1980's.

Information also contributed by Big John WV,gamewarrior,Marguerite Richardson, and Pseudo_Intellectual