The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Mappy
You definitely need to play this classic maze chase game about a police mouse and some naughty cats that never really caught on outside of Japan.
RELEASE DATE: 1983
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Namco
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
I almost didn’t include Mappy in this series because I felt like it’s one of those games that’s been featured in so many Namco Museum compilations that it ought to be well-known by now. And yet as I was conducting my research, I realized that while Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga, Xevious and even Rally-X are frequently listed as some of the best arcade games of the 1980s in lists and retrospective pieces, Mappy is rarely mentioned alongside them. It’s a shame, because Mappy is a really excellent maze chase-style game that really deserves a stronger reputation. It’s also a game that’s produced some interesting sequels which we’ll also discuss here.
But first, some peculiar history. Mappy is based on two characters Namco created for a competitive robotics line called “Maze-Solving Robots” in 1980 and 1981. The original was a big red cat named Goro, and the later model was a mouse named Mappy in a policeman’s outfit whose name was apparently a play on “Mappo,” a Japanese slang word for a policeman. At some point, a smaller home version of Mappy was also sold under the name “Get to it! Mappy” and even included another cat called a Meowky. Namco’s development team must have enjoyed the characters enough to want to make a game around them, and in 1983, they released one.
Mappy is a horizontally scrolling platform game with six floors that are contained within a house (as well as an attic which you can also visit on some stages). As the policeman mouse Mappy, your job is to go into the house and retrieve a number of consumer electronics, safes and copies of the Mona Lisa that were stolen by a gang of purple cats called the Meowkies and their leader Goro, a fatter, slightly brighter cat who’ll hide behind objects and try to catch you. It's a clever semi-inversion of the cat and mouse dynamic.
The game’s broken into fifteen stages subdivided into four groups consisting of two or three levels and a bonus stage. On the fourth, eighth and twelfth rounds, a new mechanic is introduced before things begin cycling again with more challenging enemies. The purple Meowkies move faster than Mappy, and while Mappy will die if any cat catches him, he has a few tricks he can use to keep them off his tail, most of which work on any stage.
The first is to jump on a trampoline. These are positioned all over the house and allow Mappy and the Meowkies to select an exit lane on their way up. While the trampolines are always at the bottom of the map in the earlier stages, they’re increasingly scattered all over the place later on, and learning to use them as a means to escape is crucial if you want to survive past the fourth or fifth stage since they can slow the Meowkies’ progress and give you a chance to get away from them. On the eighth stage, the trampolines even allow you to reach a bell that can be dropped in some parts of the house, stunning the Meowkies who are hit by it.
The second trick is to slam open doors and hit the Meowkies with them. Doors come in two varieties – the standard type that simply stun any Meowkies who are hit by it and the glowing type that unleashes a wave attack that will fly across the entire lane and pick up any Meowkies it touches. The standard doors can be opened and closed multiple times with the press of a button, but the glowing doors lose their energy after the first use. Both are handy for escaping fast-encroaching Meowkies, but it’s also easy to get knocked back by them yourself, so they require some finesse and careful practice to use well.
The third trick, only available on stages 12-14, involves glowing sections of the floor which serve as trap doors. Mappy can activate these to drop Meowkies down to the next floor, stunning them.
While Mappy was a pretty big hit in Japan, it didn’t do so well in the United States, and the common story you’ll hear (referenced unsourced, for example, on the Moby Games trivia page for Mappy entry) is that Bally Midway had their choice of distributing either Mappy or Pole Position and went with the mouse over the groundbreaking racing game. Given that the two games were released almost a year apart, I suspect that story isn’t quite accurate, but what I will suggest is that the tale at least captures the shift in attitudes among North American arcade games. Atari’s US release of Pole Position, which was one of the top-grossing arcade cabinets of all time, was revolutionary because it was the first video arcade game to make players feel like they were really racing behind the wheel of a powerful car.
Mappy, by contrast, is very cute and childish, lacking the surreal appeal of Pac-Man and the sheer accessibility of other kid-friendly games of the era like Frogger. It's also the sort of game where you’ll waste several playthroughs dying before you really understand the mechanics, and it’s still very easy to make dumb mistakes the longer you play. Cute and challenging have never been a strong selling point for gamers outside of Japan, and it’s not surprising that most of the rest of the series never made it to North America.
In 1986, Namco released Hopping Mappy, a strange Japan-only arcade sequel that I can only sort of recommend for its novelty. Rather than having Mappy continue to explore houses and retrieve treasures with the aid of trampolines, Namco opted to have the police mouse jump on a pogo stick and hop around grassy green grid-based levels full of chaotically-bouncing Meowkies and cutely animated items. (Goro shows up too, but he’s not on a pogo stick and is pretty easily knocked down.) While it’s very amusing and has wonderful graphics, I found it tedious after a few levels and not nearly as replayable as the original Mappy.
1986 also saw the release (at least, in Japan) of Mappy Land, a Famicom sequel that plays out in four acts as Mappy tries to throw a birthday party for his love interest Mapico court, then the two mice get married, celebrate Christmas and plan a birthday party for their son. Before you get overly excited about this story, however, understand that it’s just an excuse to send Mappy out to the game’s eight different stages four times so he can collect different sets of objects. The story also starts looping after Mappy Jr.’s birthday party. All in all, it’s a decent follow-up to the arcade game with some wonderful graphics for its time (particularly Goro’s humorous outfits on each stage), but it already felt a little dated when North American audiences finally got a chance to play it in 1989 on the NES, and the time since hasn’t done it many favors.
Speaking of 1989, Japanese gamers received one more sequel that year with the Famicom-exclusive Mappy Kids, which is a more conventional platform game where Mappy Jr. has to buy his way into the heart of a young mouse he’s in love with. In between levels, you can purchase household furniture and play a slot machine that opens up some strange minigames. It’s a humorous-looking game in the vein of Capcom’s Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, but it’s entirely in Japanese and has a surprising amount of text for a platformer. It’s also fairly mediocre as platformers go and not anything I’d recommend to anyone but the most devoted of Mappy fans.
If you want to play Mappy today, you’re in luck – Namco has re-released in many times in many different collections, and whether you’re playing Namco Museum Vol. 2 on the PlayStation, Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 on modern hardware or anything in between, it’s a fairly easy game to play legally on many platforms. It’s also been widely ported to many classic console and 8-bit PC systems, though I’d argue that the arcade version is the best.
I also recommend Mappy Arrangement, which has only ever been released in arcades as part of 1995’s Namco Classic Collection Volume 1 and which is a remastered version of the game with a networked two-player mode, additional worlds, Goro Robot boss stages and even a secret mode that changes the look of the characters. While it received a graphical upgrade from the original Mappy, it does compromise the game a bit with fewer floors and a little less excitement overall compared to some of Namco’s other Arrangement games. The only way to play this game today is through arcade emulation with a game ROM, and to date, it’s the last non-mobile Mappy game Namco has released.
FUN NOTE: In Japan, Goro’s name in the game is Nyamco, which is a rather decent pun combining the name of the publisher and the word “nyan,” a Japanese word for the sound a cat makes.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!