Day 69: Pogo (ZX Spectrum)

The ZX Spectrum returns in my ongoing efforts to play one randomly selected title from my 564 game backlog for every day that the UK is in lockdown...

Pogo for the ZX Spectrum
Previous days' entries can be read HERE

It’s going to be a short one today because ‘Pogo’ is... well... it's ‘Q*bert’ - and what new could I possibly find to say about ‘Q*bert’?

Lets see...

Clones of popular arcade games were far from uncommon in the early days of home computing, the ZX Spectrum itself was just recovering from a glut of ‘Pac-Man’ clones in early 1984 and was soon suffering from a similar, if smaller, assault from knock-off ‘Q*berts’.

An official arcade port of the game was actually in the works for the Spectrum at some point but was never officially released. If you're interested TAP images to play it can be found easily on the internet (World of Spectrum, as always, will see you right).

You may also find on that site, what I assume is, a knock-off of ‘Q*bert’ that's brazenly called ‘Q*Bert’ - but the quality is so basic that I can't believe it has anything to do with the original. That, and it’s in German.

‘Pogo’ doesn't have anything to do with the real ‘Q*bert’ either, but you wouldn't believe it to look at it.

The long nosed, bipedal creature, the balls that fall from the top and tumble down the pyramid, the snake that appears and chases you around, even the lifts to take you back to the summit - it's all replicated here. The way Q*bert ‘Pogo’ jumps even has the same style as the original arcade game.

But, in the end, is that a bad thing? 

‘Q*bert’ was, and still is, a great game. It's simple goals and deceptive difficulty make it a timeless classic and, given that ‘Pogo’ is not just an accurate recreation of ‘Q*bert’, but actually a far better ‘coin-op conversion’ than was provided ‘officially’ to many other arcade games of the time, can we not also say that ‘Pogo’ is a timeless classic?

Well, no, because it’s a knock-off… 

But if (for some reason, 36 years later) you still lament the failure of Gotlieb to provide an official conversion and desperately want to play ‘Q*bert’ on your Spectrum then this is exactly that. And if you just want to take a look and see if I’m exaggerating then the game is playable at: http://torinak.com/qaop#!pogo (No affiliation).

Pogo - It’s Q*bert, Q*bert is great, therefore Pogo is great. But it's also a shameless knock-off.