Made by: MicroFun (1984)
Genre: Platform/Puzzle
Did I have this? Yes
What Is It?
In this cousin to Dig Dug, you play Rockford, an adventurous prospector who searches through various caves to collect as many gems as he can before time runs out, escaping through an escape tunnel revealed when a certain amount is collected. It's really a puzzle game, as each cave is a maze with walls, rocks that can fall on you if you dig through their supports, amoebas that ooze into cavities, and killer creatures like fireflies and butterflies.
An addictive digging game, Boulder Dash (nice pun) has at its core a very simple mechanic. You can move in four directions, eating up dirt wherever you move to on what is essentially a grid (no fractional movement). The difficulty comes from gauging the physics. While Rockford can support rocks over his head, getting hit by a falling rock creates an explosion (indeed, any falling rock hitting a living being will take out a chunk of the grid and everything inside). If rocks just fell in a straight line, it would be pretty easy, but rock slides do happen, and rocks will fall in an adjacent shaft, tipping over the edge Rockford just made. You're as fast as a falling rock, so you have a chance to get out of the way, but I'm talking about the character, not your specific hand/eye coordination. Falling gems will also kill you, so don't expect easy pick-ups à la Mario. Once you've picked up enough gems, the screen will flash, indicating the exit has appeared on the screen (which scrolls when you near the edge, making it impossible to see the complete puzzle, which does cause problems until you memorize them). You can keep picking up gems for points (at each 500 increment, the tunnels flash with lines, indicating you won a life) until you have them all, but be aware there's a timer on very level, and that you die if it reaches zero. Rocks can be pushed in singles, but not once they touch each other. Getting trapped behind walls and rocks means you're dead in the water, and Button A will kill Rockford and restart the screen so you don't have to wait out the clock. Annoyingly bu necessarily, after each death (you start with 3 men, by the way), the current level resets, so you have to do everything all over again.
That's the basic game, but each of the 16 levels (and 4 puzzle intermissions) has its own difficulties, including moving enemies you must run from, or sometimes turn into gems by dropping rocks on them. Fireflies have detectable patterns so you can trap them in loops. Butterflies are more random, but explode into gems. Amoebas don't kill, but they fill space, adding an extra ticking clock as they block off entire areas by subdividing; you can only stem the tide by surrounding them with rocks. If you get to the end, you start back at the first level, but you have less time to complete the puzzle and escape. There are 4 difficulty levels in all. Thankfully, the C64 Mini has 4 save slots per game, so if you get through a level without losing a man, you're within your rights to save the game so you can start there. But even if you don't, you're not stuck in the first 3 or 4 levels until you actually get good at the game. Live it up. The start menu allows you to start at 4 different levels (first, fifth, ninth and thirteenth), so you can experience amoebas and butterflies, all that good stuff even if you're having difficulty with those early mazes.
On a strict appreciation level, Boulder Dash is fast, so your mistakes are often due to forgetting it is a puzzle game. You have to strategize and will probably need several runs through a level to master it. Racing for gems is just going to get you killed.
The original look of Boulder Dash is primitive compared to later editions, but despite the amount of the dread C64 brown on show in many levels, I think it's more than functional. Rockford is a sympathetic figure, tapping his foot when you leave him idle for a few seconds, and perfectly acceptable as an avatar. The boulders fall and bounce with an eye for real physics and a satisfying crash, and the gems are easy to spot, shining as they do, and making glinty sounds when they fall or are grabbed. The green, oozing amoebas look pretty cool, and the butterflies have just enough animation to them. The fireflies are the uggos of the lot, looking like force field squares (I had to read the manual to figure out what they were). The other iffy visual element is when you reveal the exit or win a man. The screen flashes variously and you think all hell's about to break loose. Ahhhh! Once you know why it does that, it's a nice little celebration though. It's only iffy for your first game.
The music is very computery, and only on the menu screen. When a level spawns, there's a twinkly computer generation sound (which seems to imply it's being randomly generated, but it isn't). When you get close to running out of time, a little tune will warn you.
The World
Rockford is just mining for gems, it's pretty simple. What he finds underground is more than a little mystifying, of course. It's a land of pure game. Butterflies and fireflies shouldn't be deadly, nor live underground like that. Amoebas aren't that big. But there's logic to the way the rocks fall, and I suppose you could say the butterflies are crushed into diamonds, in a sort of flash-fossil kind of way. It's silly to try and make sense of it.
Bottom Line
An enduring classic, Boulder Dash has had remakes and sequels up through the Xbox 360, and Rockford's been a cat, a rodent, an alien, and a robot. And it deserves to be. For such a simple game, it offers a lot of variety in terms of puzzles, and has an exciting time/deadly enemies element you don't see in all puzzlers. I can see myself returning to this one frequently.
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