Episode Details

Picture an armless orange creature with a tubular snout hopping down an M.C. Escher pyramid, chased by a purple snake, spewing synthesized alien curses every time it falls. This episode unpacks the biography of Q*bert, starting with Gottlieb artist Jeff Lee's original sketch of a hero that fired mucus bombs from its nose beside a comic-book grawlix speech balloon, with influences drawn from Mad Magazine and Ed Big Daddy Roth.

We follow programmer Warren Davis, who used Lee's art to teach himself gravity and randomness, stripped out the shooting, added the color-changing cubes suggested by engineering VP Ron Waxman, and stubbornly mounted the joystick at a 45-degree angle. Then we cover audio engineer David Thiel's gibberish breakthrough, the pinball knocker kept only because foam padding cost too much, the near-miss title made of unpronounceable symbols, 25,000 cabinets sold, 125 licensed products, and an 84-hour world record game in 2013.

• Why players leapt off the pyramid within 10 seconds in location tests and why Davis regretted lowering the difficulty
• How a synthesizer that kept saying bogus points led to the iconic Q*bert swearing
• How the asterisk in the name later broke search engines and crossword puzzles
• The Saturday Supercade cartoon that gave Q*bert arms, a letterman jacket, and nose projectiles
• Why Columbia Pictures and later Sony ownership kept the character alive for Wreck-It Ralph and Pixels