History of the game

Introduced in 1982, Dig Dug was a shining addition to the golden age of video games. Dig Dug's charming world and innovative game play made it an instant classic.

A place in video game history

"During the golden age of video games we saw a lot of novel approaches to gaming," said Chris Lindsey, director of the National Video Game and Coin-Op Museum in St. Louis. "Tempest, for instance, required things of its players that we'd never seen in a video game before. You had to learn a whole new set of skills to further the game experience. Dig Dug is another game that provided a novel approach. The types of movement you had to learn, the skills you had to develop, were like none other up until that point. And this game play was combined with a really engaging subject matter, which was this guy, Dig Dug, who digs around underground after subterranean monsters, and who explodes them with a really bizarre weapon, an air pump! There was just this string of interesting, engaging things for the viewer to look at and experience while dealing with this new type of game. It really captured, and still captures, the imagination. The sounds in Dig Dug are also really distinctive. When people hear that music start to play here at the museum, they'll laugh with recognition. It's quite funny watching people play that game."

The great 25-cent escape

Lindsey enjoys seeing visitors to his museum discover a video game that rekindles memories from earlier years.
"They'll say, 'Wow, I used to be great at this!' And then they'll adopt their old game-playing position -- which seems to vary almost randomly from person to person," Lindsey said. "They drop a token in, start rolling, and then they will lose all sense of time and space, becoming completely immersed in the game. Often they'll start laughing. I had a guy yesterday who was so funny. He came in and had obviously played these video games quite a bit in years past, like many of us did. He wandered around the museum, going from game to game, and he just laughed hysterically as he remembered all the little details of each game that he had spent so much time on, so long ago."

Namco notes

After the release of Dig Dug in 1982, Namco engineers went to arcades to watch their new game being played. They noticed that "there were two completely separate groups of people. One group enjoyed blowing the enemy up with the pump. The other group enjoyed beating the enemy by dropping rocks on them."