Can You Dig It? (original) (raw)

So, I recently bought this shirt at Target for Beth:

That got me thinking about the game, and it turns out that Dig Dug is available to play online! I actually don’t think I knew that Dig Dug had been released on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, but I guess it was. I played it a little bit last night, and was terrible at it. Round 3 was the farthest I could get. Then again, it’s not like I really tried that hard. I mostly just wanted to remember what it was like, so I could write about it. And really, how can you help but like a game where the hero’s main weapon is an air pump?

The protagonist of the game is often just called “Dig Dug,” but apparently his official name is Taizo Hori, a play on the Japanese for “I want to dig.”

Picture of Taizo and his foes by Hyliaman
His son Susumu is the hero of the Mr. Driller games. The gameplay in Dig Dug is really quite simple, as was typical of most games from the era that didn’t feature loveable aliens who enjoyed Reese’s Pieces. It’s bizarre to me how much video games have developed within my lifetime, although the greater complexity doesn’t always make the later games more fun. Anyway, Taizo’s goal is to exterminate all the creatures living underground, namely the tomato-like Pookas and the fire-breathing Fygars. Beth’s shirt depicts Taizo confronting a Pooka, a creature that shares a name with a shape-shifting Celtic goblin. (Hey, maybe they would make a good subject for my next mythology post.) In addition to inflating them, you can also drop rocks on their heads.

Come to think of it, I once had a dream about having to inflate turtles in order to defeat them. If I remember correctly, the turtles resembled the ones in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, so maybe the subject of the dream was actually Taizo’s visit to another video game world. {g}

A less cutesy Taizo, in concept art for Namco x Capcom

Before I end this post, here’s the theme music from Dig Dug: