How to play Q*bert online
- Hop: hold Z (fire) and press two arrow keys together for a diagonal, for example Up and Right. Q*bert only moves diagonally, and on the 5200 he does not move at all unless the fire button is held.
- Choose a game: press 1 to 6 on the keyboard (the keypad digits), or open the on-screen keypad with K.
- Start: Enter
- Pause: P
- Player 2: I J K L with N or M held, on the second controller, in Games 4 to 6
- Full screen, Restart, save states: in the emulator’s toolbar (move the mouse over the screen)
Gameplay
Q*bert sits on top of a pyramid of cubes. Every hop onto a cube changes the colour of its top, and the round is over when all the cubes show the target colour. Later rounds add an intermediate colour, and later still a hop can undo a finished cube, so you have to plan your route.
The pyramid soon fills up with company. Red balls bounce down from the top and squash Q*bert if he is in the way. A purple ball hatches into Coily the snake, who chases you around the pyramid, and Ugg and Wrongway crawl up the cube faces. Sam cannot hurt you, but he resets cubes you have already coloured. Flying discs sit beside the pyramid: hop onto one and it carries Q*bert back to the top, and if Coily follows you off the edge he falls and you score big.
| Action | Points |
|---|---|
| Cube changed to the target colour | 25 |
| Cube changed to an intermediate colour | 15 |
| Catching a green ball | 100 |
| Catching Sam | 300 |
| Luring Coily off the pyramid | 500 |
| Each unused flying disc at the end of a round | 50 |
| Completing a round | 1,000 for the first, 250 more each round, up to 5,000 |
The game ends when you run out of Q*berts. In Games 1, 2, 4 and 5 you get a bonus Q*bert at 8,000 points and then every 14,000; in Games 3 and 6 only every 14,000.
Game selection
The six games differ only in the number of players and lives. Games 1, 2 and 3 are for one player with five, four or three Q*berts; Games 4, 5 and 6 are the same for two players, who alternate turns. There is no separate speed or skill setting.
Tips
- Press fire first, then the direction. The 5200 stick does not centre itself, and the fire button is what tells the game you really mean to hop.
- Use the discs on Coily. Wait near a disc until he is right behind you, then ride it. He drops off the pyramid for 500 points, but each disc left at the end of a round is worth 50, so don’t waste them.
- Catch Sam quickly. He is worth 300 and every cube he recolours has to be done again.
The story behind Q*bert on the 5200
Gottlieb released the arcade Q*bert in North America in October 1982. Jeff Lee drew the character and Warren Davis built the game around him. The speech bubble full of symbols that appears when Q*bert dies is a grawlix, a comic-strip swear word.
Parker Brothers picked up the home rights at the 1982 AMOA trade show and started with the Atari 2600 cartridge; the 5200 version followed in October 1983. Parker Brothers model 9500 was programmed by Daniel Small and is almost the same program as the Atari 8-bit computer version. Its best-known quirk is the controls: on other consoles players could turn the joystick 45 degrees so that the four directions became diagonals, but the 5200’s rectangular controller doesn’t allow that, so the fire button acts as a safety catch instead. Reviewer Mark Brownstein thought the imprecise controller made it the weaker of the console versions, but admitted the game grows on you.
