Where Are They Now: Q*Bert

An anonymous reader writes "Two guys who worked on SNL and the Conan show cover the drug-addled history of Atari's classic blobish-looking character, Q*Bert."

Comments

wow....

[necromaedian]

the 5 seconds it took to skim that site and decide it was a total waste of time was total worth having to look at that bloody ad that popped up for /. referrers. thanks!

Re:wow....

[Wavicle]

Oh good... it wasn't just me!

What the hell kind of contentless uninteresting crap is that for the front page? I expected that to be filed under "stuff that isn't particularly interesting or funny" or a similar topic.

Re:wow....

[astrosmash]

the 5 seconds it took to skim that site and decide it was a total waste of time was total worth having to look at that bloody ad that popped up for /. referrers. thanks!

And it's an Anonymous Coward post to boot, so we can't even harass the guy who submitted it.

Oh well, here's an interesting tidbit about Q*Bert, from KLOV:

... Q*Bert and Reactor both use the SC-01 speech synthesizer, although in the case of Q*Bert, it is never used for any kind of coherent speech. All the speech is generated by making the chip play random sounds at a specific pitch.

... Part of this game's unique charm is the pure gibberish that comes out of the machine's speech synthesizer.

Unfortunately, MAME (59) doesn't emulate the SC-01 speech synthesizer.

Q*Bert was NOT from Atari!

[Eric Smith]

Q*Bert was a Gottlieb game!

Why do people seem to think that all arcade games came from Atari?

Re:what does the * stand for anyways?

[The Bungi]

Whatever you want.

Or at least that's what the Perl regex guide said.

It all makes sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we know why SNL sucks so bad.

Re:what does the * stand for anyways?

[jdkane]

Here's a more informative article about the History of Q*Bert as recalled by Jeff Lee. An excerpt from the article partially addresses the name issue:

One of Richard's suggestions for the main character was Q*Bert, a combination of CUBE (QUBE) and HUBERT. Don't ask me who Hubert is. Waxman recalls an intermediate step, "It went from *&!!#$$! to cubert but I was afraid it would be pronounced 'cub bert' so I had suggested that the 'cu' be changed to 'q'."

Looks like the asterisk might have come from the swearing characters.

!LOL

[Pilferer]

"Two guys who worked on SNL and the Conan show ..." .. as what, janitors? I'm sorry, but this just wasn't funny. Not even a little. If it really took two people to write this, then it's a sad, sad day for geek humor.

Now THIS is funny. Well, sort of. More worthy of front page then this trash, though!

FYI... (re: "comedy", and crap)

[bscott]

"Two guys who worked on SNL and Conan" - possible translation - two guys who fielded phonecalls for SNL and fetched coffee on Conan... I know people who've WRITTEN for both shows, and there's a huge number of hangers-on who work there just for the resume credit.

"InsideJoke.TV" is, in my experience, one of a number of groups who spam the standup comedy newsgroup (and others) with pointless drivel a few times a week. I dunno how they got on Slashdot... I don't know from Slushfactory.com, perhaps they have some decent stuff elsewhere on the site, but like several previous posters, I don't have the time to go look for it.

If you have to TELL people how funny you are, you aren't.

More than you wanted to know about Q*Bert

[TheRIAAMustDie]

I loved the game, and still play it, Qix, and Bert (a mac 68xxx version of qbert) in both its original forms, and with the 2001 Q*Bert game for Macintosh.

Licensed to Konami for Japanese manufacture and distribution. (02/1983)

Inspired by artwork by M.C. Escher who was an artist that Jeff admired. Ron Waxman came up with the idea of Q*Bert changing the color of the cubes. Q*Bert's name originated by the combination of cube and Hubert, but the "Cube-Bert" was changed to "Q-Bert" to make it more unique. The concept game was called "Snots and Boogers" and then "@!#?@!" (which many of the programmers and Gottlieb VPs said would be impossible to get anyone to say) before the final version was called just "Q*Bert". Slick and Sam were a play on the phrase "spick and span" with Sam being named after co-worker Sam Russo. Rick Tighe came up with the idea of adding the pinball hardware which generated the very mechanical KA-CHUNK when Q*Bert falls off the pyramid.

Approximately 30, 000 units were produced.

Grab the rom (valid for mame from .36final to .63 ) here

PLAY INSTRUCTIONS:

- Jump on squares to change them to the target color.

- Stay on playfield! Jumping off results in a fatal plumment unless a disk is there.

- Avoid all objects and creatures that are not green.

- Use spinning disks to lure snake to his death.

- Extra life at 8000 and each additional 14000.

Twenty years ago, gamers were captivated by a foul-mouthed orange mutant named Q*bert. In the two decades following his epic battle with the relentless Coiley, Q*bert's life evolved into a happy, normal existence. Q*bert had a girl, Q*dina (you can tell she's a girl because she's got a bow ), a powerless, frustrated enemy named Q*dirk, and a big cube land to hop around in and show off the enigmatic protrusion that must be the source of his power and charm (yeah, just go on thinking it's a nose).

Recently, with the help of Hasbro Interactive, an insidious corporation called Sega stole Q*bert's female and placed arch-nemesis Coiley in his path, hoping the ensuing confrontation would be enough to revive their doomed platform.

When asked to comment on the situation, Q*bert said, "&%$#@."

Doesn't seem to meet /. criteria...

[dokutake]

This is neither "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters."

Re:You Had To Be There In Person

[geekoid]

"What happened to /. editing?"

nothing.