This Week In Retro: Mr. Do! (Patreon)

September 1982: Dig That Clown...He's Real Gone

by Diamond Feit

When did clowns transform from symbols of whimsy to sinistrous incarnate? I remember going to the circus as a child and seeing Bozo the Clown on cable TV and neither of these pop culture mainstays disturbed me in the slightest. Once Krusty the Clown entered our lives in 1989, his reputation as an unfunny louse soured a lot of children on the idea that clowns automatically make people laugh, but "tells bad jokes" isn't on the same level as "creeps me out."

Yet today it seems that horror has replaced humor as the defining characteristic of clowns. Images of murderous or monstrous clowns have been around for decades, notably featured in Stephen King's It, cinema classic Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and the infamously violent arcade game NARC. Enough people in the United States find clowns scary that an official term, coulrophobia, has joined other words like claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and triskaidekaphobia in the English language.

Divorced from their circus origins, clowns have become a shortcut for making players feel uneasy in the world of modern video games.  A simple google search for "clowns in video games" returns listicle after listicle of "freakiest" "horrifying" and "terrifying" examples. Even when a game features a clown protagonist, such as the 2015 indie Dropsy, the lead character's ghastly face and exaggerated movement only adds to the twisted, surreal atmosphere. In the early days of the medium, however, when crude graphics made recreating realistic-looking people on screen rather difficult, clowns represented a quick fix when a developer needed something resembling a human being. Mario wouldn't look right with chalk-white skin but a clown doesn't need flesh tones.

Which brings us to September 1982, 40 years ago, when a cute little clown named Mr. Do became a surprise star for Japanese developer Universal. In his eponymous debut, Mr. Do blatantly borrowed elements from other hit arcade titles, but the game found an audience and Universal suddenly had a marquee name on their hands.

Mr. Do! is a hard game to explain without relying entirely on other games as a frame of reference. Our hero doesn't do anything normally associated with clowns or the circus, and his enemies do not resemble any known man or beast. Does the game take place on our planet, and if so, is it inside an arena or does it play out underneath the Earth's surface? I cannot answer these questions, and I don't know that anyone responsible for Mr. Do! can either.

Any visitor to an arcade in 1982 would, upon laying eyes on Mr. Do!, notice the similarities between it and another hit from earlier that same year, Dig Dug. The Namco classic sent players on a mission to plow their way underground and burst baddies with an air pump; the blue sky and flowers on the surface made this setting crystal clear. In Universal's Mr. Do!, players also dig, but without any sense of where or why. The objective on each screen is to recover all the cherries and avoid the monsters who cannot (with exceptions) dig any tunnels on their own. Thus, every path that Mr. Do creates doubles as a course for his enemies to pursue him.

Mr. Do has but one weapon, a ball that destroys enemies on contact. However, because the ball bounces off all surfaces, the dirt or whatever Mr. Do digs through defines the ball's motion, limiting its effectiveness to narrow passages. Without boundaries, the ball bounds away unpredictably, and Mr. Do can only throw one at a time. Even an accurate toss leaves him defenseless for a few seconds before a new ball spawns in his hands; a loose ball will continue to fruitlessly travel for much longer.

Besides his ball, Mr. Do's only other offensive option are the apples placed on every screen. Their remarkable size forces me to ask another question: are these giant apples, or does the entirety of Mr. Do! play out on a very small scale? Like the boulders in Dig Dug, should a path open beneath them, the apples will fall straight down and crush anyone in the way. Unlike with Dig Dug's rocks, Mr. Do can push the apples to the left or right, where they will drop if nudged into a vertical shaft.

While Mr. Do! lacks any staff roll, credit for the game's design goes to Kazutoshi Ueda, and he admits that his creation took direct, implicit inspiration from Dig Dug. "Management directly told us to copy the game," he told Gamest in a 1989 interview. While chasing after hit products was a common practice at the time, as outlined above, Mr. Do! may look like Dig Dug but without a reliable weapon like the air pump, it doesn't play like it, and with the addition of cherries and other bonus items, Ueda's work places far more emphasis on evasion and collecting than combat.

Ueda didn't stay long at Universal, jumping ship for Tecmo in 1983, yet Mr. Do remained and would continue to star in new games for years. However, much like future Dig Dug games, these sequels played completely differently than the 1982 original. I have many fond memories of Mr. Do's Castle, a 1984 Lode Runner-esque game that hands our clown a hammer and pits him against waves of invading unicorns. His follow-up adventures never caught as much attention as his debut, though, and he made his final appearance to date in Neo Mr. Do!, a 1997 NEO•GEO exclusive that attempted to update the original for the 90s while remaining faithful to the concept of a clown who digs a lot.

Thus ends the saga of Mr. Do, a clown who made a name for himself 40 years ago but never quite managed to achieve actual fame. In this regard, Mario had a gigantic advantage: His casual appearance allowed him to easily slip into the "everyman" role, enabling Nintendo to slip him into any and all game concepts. Mr. Do never stopped being a clown, though, requiring all his subsequent games to incorporate fantastic, whimsical elements befitting the protagonist. Imagine how distracting it would be to play Punch-Out!! and see the referee come out in full face-paint.

How does that old saying go? You can take the clown out of the circus, but you can't take the circus out of the clown. I suppose a willing studio could possibly attempt to license and revive Mr. Do in the 21st century, but given the current coulrophobic climate, I don't know if anyone would unironically accept him. To make a game starring a clown work today, I think the only recourse would be to lean into the discomfort and go for the "gritty reboot." Set the game in a graveyard, replace the apples with headstones and the cherries with baby shoes (never worn). Hey kids, Mr. Do is back and this time, it's personal.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.