Not all famous arcade games came from powerhouses like Namco and Atari. Several smaller companies also manufactured arcade games in the early 1980s, hoping to tap into some of the success enjoyed by the big players. Sometimes one of these other games found an appreciative audience, enough to let their creators stay in business. Once in a while, one of these smaller companies hit one out of the park, creating a game as massively popular as anything put out by the more established companies. Stern did it with Berzerk in 1980. Two years later, Gottlieb found fame and fortune with Q*bert.
Q*bert the character was the creation of Jeff Lee. Inspired by artists like M.C. Escher and Ed Roth, Lee created a big-nosed, armless hero, hopping around a pyramid of blocks. Lee's original idea was to have his hero shoot projectiles from his big, tube-shaped nose, knocking his enemies off of the pyramid. Lee's drawings were then noticed by Warren Davis. Davis was still new to the video game industry, and so he hoped to used Lee's characters to further his own ability at creating video games. As Davis tinkered with Lee's ideas, a game began to take shape. Davis decided a game that was easy to learn and control, playable with only one hand, would be best. Lee's nose gun was set aside, and simple enemies like bouncing balls were added. Then, while looking over Davis's shoulder one day, Gottlieb executive Ron Waxman suggested having the colors of the blocks change as the hero moved around them. With that extra touch, the game was just about done. All it needed was a name.
Lee originally titled his idea Snots and Boogers, but that name was quickly disgarded, especially once it was decided there would be no nose gun. Cubes was the game's working title through much of its development, but nobody was keen on releasing with that name either. The character's creative swearing almost lead to the name @!#?@!, but nobody was quite sure how to pronounce that. A Gottlieb employee then thought up Hubert, and another staff member combined ideas to produce Cubert. Finally, Gottlieb art director Richard Tracy reworked the name into Q-bert, with the dash changing to an asterisk before release.
Q*bert was Gottlieb's only major success story in video games, but it was a big one. The game wowed players and critics, and Q*bert himself proved likable enough to appear in merchandising and even his own cartoons. Meanwhile the game was ported to many different computers and home systems by Parker Brothers, and later saw ports to Nintendo's Entertainment System and Game Boy as well. Sequels also appeared, including the arcade Q*bert's Qubes and the 3D Q*bert released in 1999.
One of the original game's most endearing features is Q*bert's reaction when caught by an enemy. What seems like an intential garbling of something perhaps unprintable actually came out of a frustrated attempt to create something more understandable. Among Q*bert's hardware is a sound chip designed for speech. The chip has to be programmed syllable by syllable to produce actual words. Sound designer David Thiel never could make the words sound exactly like he wanted, and so he eventually decided to string together random bits and pieces instead. The result was both memorable and amusing, with players wondering, just what exactly is Q*bert saying?!