Dig Dug A2600 Atari 2600 game

Create your own maze as you fearlessly tunnel through the earth. Your objective: Harvest tasty vegetables worth healthy points. Your enemies: spirits aiming to bury you alive, fierce fire-breathing dragons, and mean balloon-like bullies! Can you dig it? Here's the thrilling home version of the famous coin-operated original!

Dig Dug is an arcade game that was developed and published by Namco in Japan in 1982 for Namco Galaga hardware. It was later published outside of Japan by Atari, Inc.. A popular game based on a simple concept, it was also released as a video game on many consoles.

In Dig Dug, you play as the titular character, tasked with tunneling through the earth using your shovel. However, you're not alone underground. Two monsters, Pooka and Fygar, will relentlessly chase you. Armed with only an air pump, you can inflate these monsters until they explode. But beware, if you stop pumping, they'll return to normal. You can also use rocks scattered throughout the earth to squash them. If the monsters fail to find you, they transform into invincible ghosts that can pass through walls.

Vegetables occasionally appear in the center of the maze, offering points when collected. But tread carefully, as the deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes. Fygars, green dragons that breathe fire, are worth double points when exploded horizontally. And dropping rocks on enemies yields bonus points, with subsequent kills earning even more.

The game features color-coded levels, with deeper enemies yielding higher points. As you progress, more monsters appear, and they become faster and more aggressive. However, be wary of glitches, like the one where dropping a rock on an exploding enemy causes all enemies to disappear, halting progress.

Each round is marked by flowers in the corner of the screen, with dirt colors alternating every fourth round. But beware of round 256, where the game becomes unplayable due to a glitch in the original Namco version. Luckily, the Atari version fixes this issue.

So, grab your shovel, inflate those monsters, and dive into the depths of Dig Dug!