When the game was finished, it had still not been named.
Gottlieb management wanted something cute to take advantage of licensing possibilities. A VP of marketing, Howie Rubin, wanted to use what was in the cartoon bubble when Q*bert dies as the name, the symbolic expletive. They actually sent engineering samples of the game to arcades with that as the title, but that test proved that it’s pretty important to have a pronounceable name for a game. How else will people talk about it?
Everyone at Gottlieb was asked to help brainstorm a name and a list of about 50 options, including “Arnie Aardvark”, was generated. None of the options from the list really worked so they had another meeting.
Someone started playing with the word “cube”. Someone else suggested “Hubert” since it sorta rhymed. Those were smashed together to get “Cubert”. The group liked the sound of that. Then Rich Tracy, the art director, wrote it as “Q-BERT”… somehow the asterisk was inserted…
And Q*bert hopped happily ever after.
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In 1982 Warren Davis needed a new project at Gottlieb. Inspired by a screen full of hexagons, Davis built a pyramid of cubes floating in space. He added balls bouncing down the pyramid, simply to learn how to program randomness and gravity.
Meanwhile, Jeff Lee had created a bunch of characters including an orange one with a big nose. Lee had originally intended that the character shoot using his nose. He even wrote a game description called “Snots and Boogers”.
Davis wasn’t interested in shooting though. There were a lot of shooting games at that time and he wanted to do something different, something special. He brought in Lee’s characters, but stuck with “The Cube Game” to see it through.
As Davis was playing with his work in progress, hopping this character around the cubes while avoiding falling balls and wondering what to do next to make this into a game, Ron Waxman (Gottlieb’s VP of Engineering at the time) suggested the squares might change color as the character lands on them. Now there was a goal, and the game was born.
Lee’s characters came alive with little touches, like Q*bert’s knees bending as he lands. David Thiel gave Q*bert a voice, using random phonemes of a speech chip to create the gibberish. Contrary to myth, the only actual words Q*bert says are “Hello, I’m turned on.” when the arcade game is powered up and “Bye-bye” at the end of the game.
Now, many years later we are still talking about Q*bert as this beloved game continues to be ported to new platforms. That’s pretty special.
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