Mr. Do vs. Mr. Pac-Man - Features

In this corner, the Champeen! Pac-Man! And in this corner, the challenger, Mr. Do!

Ready? Fight!

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Mr. Do vs. Mr. Pac-Man

In what we hope will be an ongoing "versus" series, we are going to compare two classic game characters in interesting and unusual ways.

Mr. Do! is a character you might not have heard of. He starred in the 1982 arcade game of the same name and from that original version, several sequels were spawned. The first (Mr. Do!’s Castle) was even more successful than the original game.

Mr. Pac-Man (if there is a Ms. Pac-Man, surely it’s safe to call him Mr. Pac-Man) came out a couple of years earlier in 1980 and also spawned a very successful sequel – Ms. Pac-Man.

Even from this very early point, the two games start down very different paths –

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but not always the one you would expect.

Mr. Do! had his gameplay inspired by other titles. The original Mr. Do! is very much like Dig Dug and Mr. Do!’s Castle shows influence from many platform titles including the “grand daddy” of platformers, Universal’s own Space Panic.

Both games started out in the arcades and eventually made their

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way to the home systems. It is here where things start to get interesting. Pac-Man was made available on virtually every platform that was capable of running it (and one or two that really wasn’t). Mr. Do! never made it to the Intellivision or certain personal computers where Pac-Man made it everywhere. It’s also interesting to note that other than later ports to the Gameboy, Super Nintendo and Neo Geo Mr. Do! has never been heard from again. Or has he? It looks like Namco has picked up the rights to bring him to the mobile gaming platform, so maybe there is still hope. Next-gen sequel anyone?

So what? There are lots of games that haven’t come close to the popularity of Pac-Man. While that is true, few other classic games have the value that Mr. Do! has – and so consistently. A quick look at the pricing information in Video Game Collector magazine shows some interesting statistics (these U.S. dollar values are shown for loose cartridges only)

Platform Mr. Do! Mr. Do!’s Castle Pac-Man Ms. Pac-Man

Atari 2600 8 65 1 3

Atari 5200 N/A 35 2 3

SNES 25 N/A 8* 9

Gameboy 28 N/A 8 9

Colecovision 10 35 N/A N/A

In the most drastic example, Mr. Do!’s Castle sells for over 21 times what its counterpart (Ms. Pac-Man) does on the same system. At the other end of the scale, Mr. Do! still sells for more than 3 times what Pac-Man does.

A complete collection of Mr. Do! from the table above shows you spending $206, where all the Pac-Man you can eat will only cost $43 and even that is generous.

So what makes Mr. Do! so valuable? Part of it is the rarity, but there are many examples of games that are rare and still not valuable. The games are definitely fun, which helps. Ultimately, it could just be the combination of relatively low print runs combined with a fun game and just a dash of indescribable magic.

Whatever the case, Mr. Do! deserves some of your attention whether it’s by rounding out your Colecovision collection or giving your hard drive a short workout running MAME. Don’t forget to check out our classic review of Mr. Do! at http://www.armchairempire.com/classic_gaming/mr_do.htm.

- Syd Bolton

(March 12, 2008)

Syd Bolton has been collecting game consoles for over 20 years and has dozens of systems and over 5,000 games. He even owns a boxed copy of Mr. Do! for the Colecovision. Do you? Tell us about it if you do.


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