Obscure Games You May Not Have Heard Of - Episode 8, Anteater

The “Maze Game” is a genre that RULED the early 80s in arcades, but sadly we don’t see much anymore, and for a genre with so many amazing games, we really only ever think about… y’know, Pacman. And not much else. But I’ve always thought Pacman is just pretty okay. You know what game is GREAT though?

Anteater.

Anteater is a 1982 arcade title, and one of my absolute favorites. It MAY look slightly familiar to you when you see the actual game… I’ll get to that. It was made by Chris Oberth and published by Tago Electronics, a group you’ve probably never heard of. It never really got the recognition I think it deserved, and faded into extreme obscurity. Most arcade games from that era did. For every Donkey Kong or Digdug, you have a Mr. Do or Anteater.

The game is simple. You are the anteater at the top, and you control its tongue, which is going along to scoop up all the ant eggs in the ant colony. If an ant touches your tongue at all, you die. They spawn along the corridors and then wander across from one edge to the other. If you touch one with the tip of your tongue, you’ll gobble it up for points! To avoid being killed by ants, you can press the button to retract your tongue and bring it back up to the top, where only the tip will dangle down

Careful though, because the Worm works differently! If it touches your tongue, you’ll be fine, unless its front touches your tip, in which case you’ll die. You need to sneak behind it and eat it from the back. A few other enemy types will spawn too, like red ants and caterpillars, who will turn around at random and travel back to the side they spawned from. And finally, after the sun sets, a spider will spawn and follow your tongue trail all the way to its tip, where it will kill you. This also makes it much harder to clean up cause you can’t hide as easily, so go fast!

Only a few other intricacies remain. Like I said, simple. At the bottom of the map are two ant queens. Grab one, and all enemies on screen disappear. This is a good panic button, especially while grabbing the dangerous bottom eggs. This ALSO includes the spider! After beating the level, you move to the next anthill, which has a slightly randomized layout, but no other changes. The days become shorter, and it gets harder and harder until you’re out of lives!

At the end of a level, or when you die, you also get your Ant Times Worm Bonus! This is one of the best ways to wrack up score, so eating as many ants and worms as possible is a good idea! Though it’s quite dangerous, worms will always spawn on the level you’re at regular intervals, and the ants spawn on regular intervals too, so you can try and plan things out! The game falls into a bit of a rhythm, and it’s extremely addictive and fun.

And that’s it! Except…. not quite. Now we get to talk about copycats and clones. You see, Anteater never got the recognition it deserves… but its clones sure did. A year later, Oil’s Well was released for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, and ported to damn near every PC at the time.

This is honestly really sad to me, it’s kind of like if Donkey Kong never took off or got the recognition it deserved, but a bootleg like Big Kong did instead.

This kind of thing was extremely normal back then, though. Copycat clones were EVERYWHERE, for EVERY GAME. Most of the times no official home version of these games existed, so why not just… blatantly steal their game? I know I had a more than a few “PC-Man”s for the DOS on floppydisks as a kid. The sad thing is that Chris Oberth tried to get in on this market too with the Apple II game Ardy the Aardvark, which is basically the port of his own arcade game, but THAT PORT DIDN’T SELL WELL EITHER.

For such a great example of the venerable ancient genre of Maze Games, Anteater never got the love it so desperately deserved, and I wanted to rectify that. It’s one of my favorites. I took a pilgrimage out to a barcade in NYC to play it and get my high score on there (and by that I mean my boyfriend and I went out to the barcade when I visted him in NYC lol). It’s a super fun time, and extremely addicting.

Also, fun fact, the current high score world record record holder is some actress I’d never heard of. Apparently between her time acting on HBO shows, she also got the high score of Ant Eater. I’ve gotten kinda close to her score, but never beaten it.