Q*bert — Character

Q*bert · Protagonist · Debut: 1982 · Arcade · Created by Jeff Lee (character), Warren Davis (programming)

Gottlieb's orange, big-nosed hopper who curses in "@!#?@!" — the star of a 1982 arcade hit that became one of the most merchandised games after Pac-Man.

Q*bert hops diagonally around a pyramid of 28 cubes, changing each one to a target colour while avoiding the snake Coily and other creatures, in the 1982 arcade game made by Gottlieb. Artist Jeff Lee designed him: an armless orange creature with a long snout who, in the first concept, fired "mucus bombs" from his nose. Programmer Warren Davis removed the shooting to keep the controls simple, and the cube pyramid, inspired by M. C. Escher, became the game. When Q*bert is caught he curses in a speech balloon of symbols, "@!#?@!", a joke of Lee's that stuck, while audio engineer David Thiel made his garbled voice by stringing random phonemes together on a speech synthesiser. The name came from "Cubes", the project's working title, combined with "Hubert" into "Cubert", which art director Richard Tracy changed to Q-bert; the hyphen later became an asterisk. The game sold about 25,000 cabinets and was one of the most merchandised arcade games, behind Pac-Man. Q*bert had his own segment in the Saturday Supercade cartoon (1983–1984) and later appeared in Wreck-It Ralph and Pixels.