Dung Beetles

Dung Beetles is an Apple II maze video game written by Bob Bishop published in 1982 by Datasoft. The gameplay is similar to Pac-Man, but a portion of the maze around the player-controlled character is enlarged as if being viewed through a square magnifying glass.

Dung Beetles was ported to Atari 8-bit computers and the TRS-80 Color Computer. The Color Computer version, programmed by Steve Bjork, was sold by Tandy as Mega-Bug. Later Apple II and Atari versions were renamed to Tumble Bugs. In 1983, Datasoft moved the game to its Gentry Software label with another name change: Magneto Bugs. In Australia, the game was sold as Bug Attack. It was also released for the PC-6000 series.

Gameplay

The game concept and gameplay are based on Pac-Man, but features are much larger, randomly-generated maze and a moving “magnifying rectangle” that shows the player’s character, maze details, and nearby enemies close-up. The objective of the game is to score points by eating all of the dots in the maze. As the player character moves through the maze, it leaves a trail of dung behind. Dung beetles navigate the maze searching for the player. When a beetle finds a trail of dung, it will start following that trail, consuming it as it goes. It picks a direction at random when the trail splits, and goes back to searching if the trail ends.

The game ends when the player’s character is caught by a dung beetle, at which point the game plays a digitized voice that says “We gotcha!” and gives a brief animation.

Reception

Softline found the magnifying glass “an impressive programming feat,” and concluded that it was “a solid game … It could stand some more variety, but it certainly does not lack challenge”. Writing for ANALOG Computing, Marc Benioff called Tumble Bugs, “an outstanding variation on Pac-Man“.

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