Year: 1999 |Publisher: Namco|Developer: Namco |Original format: Arcade | Version played: Arcade
I very nearly didn’t write a blog post this week. Real life got in the way and some difficult personal dramas almost broke a 64-week streak of posts, of which I’m quite proud. I’d started the week replaying one of my favourite RPG remakes of all time, but then life got on top of me and I just felt I hadn’t played enough, and couldn’t remember enough, to do it justice. For a brief moment, I considered skipping a week entirely, but instead decided to write about something I know I can confidently talk about without needing several days to replay it. There was one clear and obvious choice…
I first encountered Mr. Driller when it released for the Dreamcast in the year 2000. I was in college at the time and working a new part-time job at GameStation in Wakefield. A colleague and I were both big Dreamcast fans and tried practically every game that came out for the system, especially if it came from one of the big classic developers like Namco. It’s an understatement to say that we both liked this game, a quirky puzzle platformer where you kind of exist inside a game of Tetris and must try to reach the bottom without getting crushed. But it’s the competitive environment we existed in at GameStation that really made me fall in love with this great game.
For those who were playing games in the late 1990s, you may recall the brief reign of memory cards as a means of saving one’s progress. The Neo Geo got there first with its tiny 2kb card, but it was the PlayStation that popularized the format with its long form adventure games and no means to save progress to CD-ROM. The Dreamcast followed suit with its own innovation – the Visual Memory Unit – which featured its own screen and buttons so you could use it as a miniature handheld console in its own right, and plug it into the Dreamcast controller to save and load your progress while adding a second screen to the joypad. It was pretty cool, but why does this matter? Well… Because in my very particular situation, working in a games shop at the turn of the century, memory cards were the ideal way to share and show off your high scores!
My friend and I enjoyed, and still enjoy, a competitive spirit when it comes to games, a rivalry that began and flourished at GameStation. We would pick a new game, like Metropolis Street Racer, which also released on Dreamcast that same year, take it home to practice overnight and then come in the next day to compare our scores or best times. This was pretty fun on the whole, but the tightly wound mechanics of Mr. Driller allowed the rivalry to reach obsessive levels.
When you first play Mr. Driller, the goal is pretty simple. Drill all the way to a bottom of a 500m well (or 2,500ft for those of you on the imperial system) without losing all three lives. This is enough of a challenge for any beginner and once you’ve mastered that you’ll naturally want to take on the level that’s twice as deep. But when you’ve mastered that too, that’s when the real fun begins…
Like other arcade games with hidden depths (see the equally brilliant Road Fighter) Mr. Driller has a game design that exists on the surface and another, the real game, hiding just underneath, almost in plain sight. If you really want to dominate the high score board then simply reaching the bottom of the well isn’t enough. You need to do it without losing a life and having collected every single oxygen capsule on the way down.
This, as your mate Han Solo might say, is the real trick. You need to collect some air capsules, of course, simply to prevent your oxygen levels from depleting as you drill ever downward. But to collect them all, you’ll often need to put yourself directly in harm’s way. Moving at great speed soon becomes second nature. Ever aware of the chaos of blocks you leave behind and above, you’ll need to act nimbly to avoid them falling on your head and crushing our cute hero to death. Once you’ve understood the game a bit more, you’ll make a mental note of which colour blocks you’ve left in your wake and which you’re moving past with each step. If like-coloured blocks touch before they drop down to you then they’ll simply pop out of existence and the falling blocks will disappear, sometimes mere inches before they would have killed you.
Play with a twenty yard stare, constantly aware of everything that’s happening on screen, knowing when to leg it and when you can be confident enough to stay the course, and it might look like reckless play or blind luck to less informed observers. Yet the opposite is true. Playing Mr. Driller at an experienced level is to know the game inside out and to operate in the zone… And the real brilliance of it is that although you’ll need to play in this way to get the highest scores, it’s the way it feels when you get it just right that is Mr. Driller’s greatest thrill. If you manage to drill through those blocks at high speed, playing perfectly and netting yourself a nice time bonus in the process, let me tell you, that’s one of the greatest feelings videogames have to offer.
It only took a few days for my friend and I to appreciate Mr. Driller and for the competition to take hold. The more we compared scores, the better we wanted to get and the more we played. We’ve been playing ever since. He went on to buy some of the arcade boards and, over two decades later, I love to plant my initials on the high score table whenever I visit.
There have been quite a few sequels and spin-offs over the years too, and so the obsession with that first game has grown into a love for the series. I immediately bought Mr. Driller 2 on Game Boy Advance so I could enjoy the game on the go, and fondly remember playing it on various train journeys during my first holiday to Japan in 2002. Mr. Driller Drill Land on GameCube was a series highlight. It expanded the formula with a theme park, er, theme, which added several variations of the core game including an RPG-like exploration mode inspired by Namco’s own Tower Of Druaga. Drill Land is the deepest, richest high point the series ever reached and I’m so pleased it’s now widely available on several formats, after decades stranded on the Japanese GameCube.
For a series that’s always flown a little under the radar, it feels like a privilege every time Mr. Driller gets a new release, and with every new addition to the gameplay I also find myself strangely enamored with the Mr. Driller lore. At some point in the series it’s revealed that Mr. Driller’s hero, Susumu Hori, is actually the son of Taizo Hori from Namco’s 1982 classic Dig Dug. Which makes a lot of sense. Both games are about digging, after all, and you can definitely see a certain family resemblance between the two helmeted, round-headed heroes. Father and son even team up in 2005’s Dig Dug: Digging Strike, which isn’t the greatest game but should be considered an essential text if you’re studying the Hori family tree.
Less obvious is the connection with Susumu’s mother, Kissy, who’s the star of 1985’s Baraduke; a relatively obscure arcade shooter that’s rarely ever seen in retro collections and was only ever converted to the Sharp X68000. If you really want to drill down the rabbit hole then check out Namco’s “United Galaxy Space Force” website, which details how Mr. Driller, Dig Dug and Baraduke fit into a maddeningly convoluted timeline alongside countless other Namco classics and curios including the likes of Starblade, Burning Force and, er… Girl’s Tank Battalion.
Mr. Driller’s strange interconnected world is an amusing sideshow, but the main attraction is undoubtedly its rich and rewarding score attack gameplay. When played at a high level, it’s completely absorbing in a way that demands your full concentration and makes the rest of the world fade into the background. It’s the perfect game to play when real life is getting a bit too much, and after the week I’ve had, I think I’ll need to play it a few more times just to zone out for a bit. If I break my personal record in the process, well that will be a nice bonus.
THREE LITTLE THINGS ABOUT MR. DRILLER THAT I RATHER LIKED
1. Nobody likes to see Susumu Hori die. Whether he perishes gasping for air or crushed by a sudden falling block, it can be a remarkably visceral and upsetting experience. But the animation of his soul transforming into an angel and flying back up the well is just the salve you need after the shock.
2. Each time you dig through a 100m (500ft) section you essentially clear a “level” and move on to a new section with a different visual theme and slightly different arrangement of block types. I always enjoy the third level, which has only two coloured blocks so that the combos come thick and fast and you drop really quickly, and it’s fun to see Susumu’s cute little arms wave as he falls through the air.
3. I also like the little visual backdrops you get at the start of each new level, which show layers of a forgotten world as you drill ever deeper.
Finally, how about some music from Mr. Driller…
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