XP Arcade: Cutie-Q

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

It’s hard to even comprehend now, but there was a time where Namco didn’t develop their own video games. Formed in 1955, Namco wasn’t called that or in the business it ended up best-known for at the time, but eventually, the business made its way into the amusement space. By 1978, they had published some video games, even, but at that point their in-house developed works were electro-mechanical arcade units, not video games like 1972’s Pong.

That would change with Gee Bee, a block breaker and pinball hybrid released in the fall of ‘78. Namco both published and developed the game, which was designed by Tōru Iwatani, whom you might know better as the creator of Pac-Man. Iwatani had wanted to make a pinball game, which would have fit in with Namco’s previous vision for the company, but starting in 1976 they had turned an eye toward video games instead. Per Steven Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games, Gee Bee was a compromise between Namco and Iwatani: he got to make a pinball video game, and it was meant to be more than “just” that, as it was also iterating on the concept of Atari’s Breakout, a popular 1976 release that Namco had published in Japan, and which had seen a number of straight-up clones come out afterward.

Gee Bee, as the first game they themselves developed, is exceptionally notable in Namco’s history, but it also didn’t immediately launch them into the upper echelon of game companies by any means. However, it still sold 10,000 units, and finished 1978 as the eighth-ranked arcade game by earnings — not bad at all, considering that (1) Gee Bee released in October of that year, and (2), Space Invaders also released in ‘78, and was so popular that an urban legend persisted for years crediting it for a quarter shortage. Gee Bee would receive a 1979 sequel, Bomb Bee, which was pretty similar to its predecessor. It had a full color display, however — remember what year it was, and that even Space Invaders released in black and white with color overlays at first — and was also the first partnership between Namco and Nintendo: the latter would publish a version of the game, Bomb Bee N.

Namco ended up finding their first major success elsewhere, at the same time as Bomb Bee, through Galaxian. Which makes a lot of sense, as Galaxian was great, and also built on the ideas of the almost impossibly popular Space Invaders: of course, in that moment, it would thrive. The company decided to give the Gee Bee series one last go, this time with Iwatani partnering up with Shigeru Yokoyama, who would later be known for his work as a producer on pretty much every major Namco series you can think of. The result was Cutie-Q, which is a notable and important release for Namco just like its predecessors, but is also clearly the best of the bunch, as well.

Here’s what makes Cutie-Q vital to Namco’s history, despite playing so similarly in its design to the other two games in the series: it was their first “character” game, with Iwatani, who handled the sprite design and creation, focusing on making cutesy little guys in this brick breaker/pinball hybrid. The reasoning behind this, as explained in Game Maestro Volume 1: Producers and Directors, was to appeal to a larger audience than just the men Iwatani so often saw milling about arcades. “If you went to the game centers at that time, you’d see nothing but guys. I thought what would make the games more attractive to women would be cute character design. So I designed cute Characters for Cutie-Q.”

Yes, even in 1979, there were some game designers out there hoping to appeal to more than just dudes, though, considering the “controversies” that arise every time, say, a segment of the gaming population forgets that you could always choose your start character at the beginning of Dragon Quest III, that information is sure to just go right over the heads of some. Why Iwatani’s design to start experimenting with cutesy characters even in a Breakout-style pinball game, though, is what came next for him and Namco: Pac-Man. Whereas none of the Gee Bee games took off as landscape-altering titles on their own, each of them contains a major piece of the puzzle of what made Namco, well, Namco. Gee Bee was their first in-house game. Bomb Bee signaled a willingness to partner with someone like Nintendo, which is a relationship that remains in place to this day. And Cutie-Q evolved the formula established by the previous two games, stylistically speaking, in a way that would give them their true, industry-shaping success story, while also changing Namco forever in the process.

Like any good pinball or brick breaker title, Cutie-Q is easy enough to start playing, but mastering it will take some time. It’s controlled with a paddle on the actual arcade unit, and, in its ports to consoles through various Namco Museum releases, buttons are substituted. There’s one significant change you come across in the controls with the switch from buttons to paddles, outside of the general accuracy you get out of moving an analog stick or D-pad in comparison to the fine-tuned paddle, which is that you can hold down a button to move your on-screen paddles faster, just like if you physically moved the actual paddle control itself on the arcade unit faster.

The key to Cutie-Q is to figure out what every on-screen element does when you hit it, a task with which you have two paddles — one in the middle and one at the bottom — to work with. The little blocks of creatures up top score you points for breaking them, yes, but the actual function of clearing them is to restore the walls that block off some of the bottom of the screen, through which your “ball” could escape through, causing you to lose that round and go to your next available ball. The first ball is in quotes, by the way, because it’s much more of a square, no matter what it might be referred to in-game due to the pinball nomenclature.

The unhappy faces, when struck by the ball, smile. When you manage to make all five of them smile at the same time, you receive a point multiplier: make a new row smile a second time, and receive another multiplier boost. Careful, however, as hitting a smiling face will make it unhappy once more — this isn’t something that locks in. You can pick up an extra ball by spelling out EXTRA on either the left or right side of the screen: the letters to do so appear and disappear and are replaced by other letters on and off throughout your game, so it’s a bit of a matter of luck along with skill. Which, very pinball, you know? Anyway, once you’ve lit up all of the EXTRA letters on one side, an arrow will point to the chute on the corresponding side, and when struck, an extra ball will appear.

At the very top and center of the screen are a various number of purple ghosts, known as Minimon. Take them out, score points, and also open up the top of the playing area, so that your ball can bounce around up there and clear out a bunch of those of those yellow and orange creature blocks, in the most Breakout-style portion of the whole game. If you clear all of those out on a given side, by the way, you not only restore the little green walls at the bottom of the screen, but you also spawn a little creature, like the one seen in the blocks: a 500 point bonus will appear, and next to it, rotating numbers 1 through 9. Whichever one is up when you strike the creature with the ball, that’s the multiplier the point bonus will receive.

You can recapture your ball from where it’s first “served,” to use the game’s terminology, by hitting it into those side traps. That’ll net you 3,200 points, which is doled out 100 points at a time, before the ball fires out into the general playing area once more. In the middle of the screen is a spinner, which grabs you an extra 10 points if you manage to send the ball through it from below — in Gee Bee and Bomb Bee, that spinner’s value could be increased so it was less of a pittance, but for whatever reason, that’s not the case here in Cutie-Q.

There is just the one stage, and no ending, this being an arcade game from 1979 and all. So, you just play until you can’t, aiming for a high score. As of this writing, the highest Cutie-Q score at Twin Galaxies is 383,040, which feels nearly impossible to pull off considering how slow accumulation can be, and how generally little control over the ball you have compared to some later virtual pinball and brick breaker games. But I only mean that in the sense of someone who played a bunch of Cutie-Q, but not anywhere near as much as anyone going for a high score on Twin Galaxies has, not with actual disbelief.

Cutie-Q, for whatever reason, has not been added to Arcade Archives yet, and hasn’t made its way to a Namco Museum for quite a while now, either. It was included in the second volume of the series on the Playstation, though, only in Japan, and then in both the Remix and Megamix Museum titles on the Wii. Given its relative simplicity, that it hasn’t been a priority for re-release isn’t a surprise — it is a single-stage pinball/brick breaker hybrid and all — but it’s still such a key game for Namco’s history that it’s a little disappointing it isn’t out somewhere on modern machines.

At the rate Namco has been going, though, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before Cutie-Q gets another shot. And likely in a place where it can get some online leaderboards: whether anyone will develop the patience to come close to the Twin Galaxies figure is another story entirely, but hey, at least let people have the chance to try.

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