Nerding Day: The Q*bert Extended Universe (Patreon)

In 1982, a video game company known mostly for nothing released Q*bert. You've probably heard of it, which is good because It's hard to describe a 1982 arcade game without sounding insane. For instance, a yellow maze pizza kills the same four men forever. But just in case, Q*bert was about a space snake trying to prevent a furry pelvis from painting pyramids. And it was a hit!

Gottlieb, the publisher whose previous titles were Shape vs. Shape Maybe, Shapes in New York I Think, and one other, knew they had to get the Q*bert merchandise out now. Shirts, bags, school supplies, toys, board game, card ga– but oh no, what is a Q*bert? What does he do? Is that a cloaca or a trunk? There's no ti– aaah, JOKE BOOK:

We're going to look at three Q*bert books all released as close to immediately as possible, and all of them building Q*bert's world in deliriously different directions. Let's start with Q*bert's Quazy Questions: A Riddle Book to Make You Laugh.

Vroomstick? Vampire state building? You can obviously go fuck yourselves, jokes, but more importantly, these aren't Q*bert jokes. This is a couple side characters from Q*bert watching Spooky Jokes From a Book Already in Progress fly by. If you told these riddles to Q*bert, he'd attack you. With no reference for any of this, he'd have no choice but to assume you were a threat and push you into the void of space. To put it another way, imagine someone had just invented Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and you excitedly bought a pack of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson valentine cards only to find this:

You have been betrayed, almost certainly by a pervert.

Not only is most of the book missing functional jokes and Q*bert, they've made the second deranged decision to illustrate the precise unlogic of each one. These help nothing. These are the remains of some impossible game of Pictionary we didn't witness. And now instead of a pun about "cider" sounding like "spider," we see a tarantula sucking up the macabre juice of its own kind. Fun. And does it really add anything to a deaf fish joke to show some hand offering it a present? He has no prayer of opening that thing, and now we have to imagine what "a herring aid" really looks like. Is it, like, a brand of headphones? A smaller fish that bites it when someone taps the glass? Why bother drawing this? Why bother giving a goldfish a present? They're not going to remember it. You could keep showing them the same box and it would assume every day was its birthday. Oh my god, is that the joke? Is Q*bert pranking a disabled fish? I… I don't get it!

Q*bert finally shows up, but only to physically get in the way of a joke. This "500 pairs of pants" punchline was definitely going to be illustrated with a pile of jeans, which wouldn't have been good, but it would have made more sense than a 20-legged centipede trying to stuff eggs in a Q*bert.

It goes on like this for a bit. There are riddles about apes and whatnot, sometimes happening near characters known only to fans of the Q*bert Arcade Unit Operator's Manual. There is no question this was a hijacked book, because when they get to an actual Q*bert joke, it's a fucking disaster:

Look at these words, placed almost randomly to disguise their meaning. Why is the act of some extended lore Q*bert character getting a suntan like a small bucket? How dare you ask me that. I will put those words on your grave so all future people will join me in stomping on your remains. You sick son of a bitch. This isn't a riddle. This is a homonym that stepped on a landmine and crawled over here to give up in front of children. And I didn't want to have to do this, but Slick? That character you shoehorned into your shitty joke at gunpoint? He's a rich forest green. He's provably not pale, you hack fuck. Look:

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is pure white and and 10 is the absence of all light, Slick's skin tone is a 6.8. Words have to mean things, Q*bert.

When is Coily not a snake? Well, I guess he wouldn't count as a snake anymore if I tore him in half and arranged his parts like a cross, sure. Because that's what you're talking about here. No one in their right mind would call a coiling snake "a little cross." It'd be like holding up a pretzel and saying, "For our sins, Jesus died on a little one of these." Or to be more accurate, it'd be like holding up a pretzel as your boss said, "Hey, Jesus freak. That pretzel is about Q*bert now. Have it on my desk by end-of-day."

Whoa. How much fur can you get from a skunk? And the answer is "As fur as possible?" That's kind of inspired. Most English speakers wouldn't even know this train of thought was an option. What a tragic twist to find out the thing Q*bert took from us might have been good.

At this point in history, Q*bert had only ever said one thing. He screamed "@!#?@!" when he died. Somehow the writer of this book took that to mean, "Q*bert 'says' the letter Q whenever possible. Phonetically it would sound the same to listeners, but he is secretly spelling it wrong. The whole rest of the book is this. Are you happy? You're making the face my spider makes when I feed it spiders."

Like a 2019 uncle, the author went so hard into this Q bullshit they lost track of reality. There was nothing worth protecting in this trash joke, and yet it's still frustrating to see Q*bert come in and ruin it. Proximity to Q*bert has made the cuckoo clock into a "Q.Q. clock," which no longer answers the question of what kind of qlock sounds like a bird! And somehow it stops being a "qlock" along the way! Every bone of this goddamn riddle has been broken and it was left here to suffer. If a statue asked this, you'd tell it to keep its sad maze and go back to fourth grade.

By the way, this Q thing is the same choice a lot of Q*bert copywriters made in 1982…

Look at this. This is something a Qopywriter's wife would find in a typewriter as a spooQy shadow fell over her and Qaved in her head with a Qrowbar. It's so far past the point of reasonable. If Xzibit was adding a 70th LED light to your car, he'd call this a bit much before saying, "wait, no, Xtremely Xtravagant! Xzibit liXes this!"

Anyway, let's get baQ to the booQ.

You're asking me what kind of pie looks the best to Q*bert? I mean, all we know about him is the letter Q thing, so the answer is going to be Q-T pie, but why did you ask it like that? Is he… are Q*bert's people attracted to pies? If the answer is yes, give us a subtle clue like a drawing of him getting fucked by one.

I don't think I'm being unfair in my artistic interpretation, because the artist seemed to agree. They made the bold choice to add a sudden mouth to this Q*bert monster in the hopes of making it look less lewd. Oh, do I sound Qrazy? Watch what happens when I erase the mouth and make him regular Q*bert:

Disgusting. And historic! Canonically, this was the first time Q*bert had a mouth. So he could pretend he wasn't jerking off into a pie!

Once the author realized they could simply change c's to q's, the rest of the rewrite process went a little faster. Would this joke make sense outside the context of Q*bert conducting a train on a nearby shore? No. Does it make sense with Q*bert? Also no! Fuh. Q!

Holy shit, two thousand pounds of wheeled, quacking trash is "A garbage duck?" It's beautiful. This is prime Heathcliff– probably an accident from someone confused about comedy, but in a joyful, wonderful way. And all it does is make me wonder: how many garbage ducks did Q*bert's desperate greed take from us? What was that Q-T pie before Q*bert defiled it?

Alongside Q*bert's Quazy Questions, Parker Brothers published the Q*bert and his friends COLORING BOOK. They wanted to make sure there was no one more confused than a 1982 Q*bert fan.

Right on the opening page our understanding of this monster is hit with a bombshell. Q*bert can speak English? So those symbols he screams when he dies are him cursing? That means children are coloring a picture of him saying, "Fuck! Fuck! What a lovely day."

On the very next page we learn Q*bert has a mother, he lives with her, and we're asked to color his breakfast. There's no way to fix this now, but in the future, if someone asks you to make a Q*bert coloring book and you start with him cursing at birds and then draw his milk and napkin, you blew it. Start over. And is that a spoon? With fucking what is he to wield that? He has a snorkel and feet. Is it ceremonial? A relic leftover from before evolution took his people's torsos? No, because that wouldn't explain this other character, Q*mongus:

So were Q*bert's arms torn off? Do they not sprout until adulthood? It's possible they hired an artist who lost track of how many limbs they'd drawn after three, but no. Rob Liefeld would have still been in high school. And like Rob Liefeld drawing a foot, Q*mongus offers Q*bert a vaguely insulting half-formed idea. He invites him, the armless pyramid painter from the stars, to lift weights.

What would a weight set look like if you were a Q*bert? A skeeball machine? A fire hydrant you suck on really hard? Definitely not a regular human barbell, and yet that's what he's looking at. What are we doing here? Q*bert is what would happen if someone tried to invent a fleshlight you only had to clean every 12 months, and like that inventor, he's lost in a world not made for him.

What is he, anyway? Is Q*bert a species? On a set of official puffy stickers they call him a Noser, but not in a way that implies, "We checked and this is his actual race."

After an awkward workout, Q*mongus takes Q*bert to a haunted house because a Q*bert coloring book isn't where our nation's top storytellers find themselves.

They are attacked by a clumsy monster, and here comes the twist every Q*bert player will see coming:

That's right! It's famous pig thing, Ugg, from this year's 13th hottest arcade sensation! He was disguised as a monster the same size, shape, and species as himself in order to scare intruders! To what end, you goddamn bastard? Well, to find out, I looked up every single word written about Ugg at this point in human history…

Here's what we know: DEADLY TO TOUCH!, and nothing else. So the painted sheet may be something Ugg has to wear in order to live his life. I don't know how to describe it, but if you wanted to say "Q*bert broke into this pig's house and he fell out of his condom," I'd say you're close enough.

Then, like a four-year-old interrupting a bedtime story, Coily and Wrong-way jump out. Wrong-way is named that because in Q*bert he travels the wrong way on the blocks. "Fuck that, I'm drawing Wrong-way the right way," said the artist, kicking another dent in the fragile Q*bert continuity.

"FUCK! FUCK!," says Q*bert as he gently hops onto the snake that kills him when he touches it. You can color this if you want, but it is stupid as shit. And I don't think I'm being pedantic. This is not your solution to snakes in any world.

Coily is Q*bert's main nemesis, so this was not the end of him. They would meet again later in the coloring book.

"We meet again, Hose Nose," hissed Coily.

"Suck my goddamn fucking dick," said Q*bert.

"God fucking damn it," said Q*bert. "This is a great view."

The story ends with a party, a lucky break for kids who wanted to color Ugg being tortured by Q*bert and his friends. Q*mongus, can you not see this creature is already in a great deal of pain? It's a horror made only to spit in the mouth of God. I'm not saying let it live, of course, but let's save the slow painful murders for the Q*bert lunch box.

"Fuck me in the fucking spout," sighed Q*bert. "What a great day it was."

In 1982, Parker Brothers also released The Adventures of Q*bert, a story written by someone who did not check with the joke or coloring book people about how this orange thing lived its life.

Wait, it opens with a translation guide? So he wasn't cursing? Q*bert has a language he alone speaks, and only sometimes? That's strange. But it might explain why they spent that party torturing Ugg to death. The word for "war crime" must be only one ampersand away from "cake" in Q*bert.

Q*bert lives in a town called Q-burg where all things, such as apples and queggs, are Qube-shaped. And to this I say, the fuck he does. I've colored a picture of his breakfast. He eats normal round apples and if he met a chicken who dared to lay a square egg, he would kill it terribly over the course of five birthday parties.

The author would systematically destroy every possible detail of Q*bert's life. You know his cool green friend? The guy is named Slick and wears sunglasses, as in, the universal symbol of cool? Well, the author of The Adventures of Q*bert disagrees. "You're not fucking cool at all, Slick," condemns this official licensed Q*bert storybook forever. Maybe this is nothing to you, but to Q*bert lore heads, this is like a disgruntled Hasbro employee changing Snake Eyes' Primary Military Speciality to "He usually goes by Todd and his erectile dysfunction distracts from his scrapbooking." Just devastating.

So the writing is terrible. Fine. It'd be crazy if it wasn't. Meanwhile, the book's uncredited artist is casually creating Q*bert masterpieces. Look at this! It's incredible, and the book is filled with scenes like it. In the world of Q*bert art, we'd never see its equal again. To compare, here's the box for the Playstation release of Q*bert seventeen years later:

This is duckless garbage. This is troubling news found during the Lawnmower Man's colonoscopy. There's a reason you didn't know it existed. Or 1983's Q*bert's Quest. Or 1984's Q*bert's Qubes. Or 1992's Q*bert 3 (they didn't even release a Q*bert 2). Or 2014's Q*bert Rebooted. Q*bert was never meant for this. Every attempt at adding to this dumb little thing's saga made him less likable. Where was I? Oh, right, this shitty book.

The book settles into a faithful adaptation of the video game, which is as bad an idea as possible. It means this is now a story about one third of a thing vandalizing a pyramid while its security guards leap to their deaths. "66$$#," Q*bert says, as if I'm going to look up 66$$# to learn the racial slur for Wrong-ways.

In the first consistent bit of Q*bert world building, the deadly snake is defeated again by someone blindly jumping into it. Our heroes have won, and according to the translation guide, Q*bert says, "I Feel Great! I know I am brave. I will triumph!"

That sucks. That's something Bionic Commando would tell reporters after a sex scandal. Q*bert was better when I thought he was saying, "Fuck all of this, fuck." Speaking of fucked, did you know less than a year later there was also a Q*bert cartoon?

Ignoring Q*bert's video game, riddle book, coloring book, and adventure book, the show was a wild reimagining of the source material. He grew arms and he went to highschool with his enemies in the 1950s. Also, the show corroborates the puffy stickers from a year earlier– his people are, in fact, Nosers. And this Noser's nose happens to be a madness pipe from a dimension of raw chaos. Here's Q*bert playing basketball with it.

First of all, that's a fucking travel. You can't screech to a halt and take six hops after you've picked up your dribble. The ball is dead, Q*bert. So it's irrelevant you used the top of a tube to shoot rather than your hands. But I want you to know it's nuts. This is how an elephant would get caught switching bodies with Victor Wembanyama. Does the hole on your nose not work, Q*bert? Am I crazy? Why not stuff it into the front and pop it into the hoop like a cannon? I hate you and that goddamn floppy dick on your face, you useless fucking maniac, Q*bert. The @!#?@! end! **!!***

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Daniel Sloane, that $&*!ing #*&$sucking mother*#$@er. In Q*bertese that means "heck of a guy!"

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.