Mouse Trap

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This article is about the video game. For the board game, see Mouse Trap (board game). For other uses, see Mousetrap (disambiguation).

Mouse Trap

Developer	Exidy
Publisher	Exidy
Designer	Designed and programmed by: Larry W. Hutcherson
Released	1981
Genre	Maze
Mode(s)	Up to 2 players, alternating turns
Platform(s)	Arcade Atari 2600 Intellivision ColecoVision
Input methods	Joystick 4 button
Arcade cabinet	Upright
Arcade CPU	M6502 (@ 705.562 kHz)
Arcade sound system	M6502 (@ 894.886 kHz), Z80 (@ 1.789772 MHz) Custom (@ 1.789772 MHz), HC55516 (@ 1.789772 MHz)
Arcade display	Raster resolution 248×256 (Horizontal) Palette Colors 8

Mouse Trap is a 1981 arcade game released by Exidy similar to Pac-Man It was ported to three home systems by Coleco; Coleco's ColecoVision, Mattel's Intellivision, and the Atari 2600.

In 1982, Buckner and Garcia recorded a song titled "Mouse Trap," using sound effects from the game, and released it on the album Pac-Man Fever. When they rerecorded the album in 1999, they were unable to find a machine and used sounds from nature, instead.

There is also a Manic Miner clone of the same name that was released for Amiga and Atari ST in 1987.

[edit] Mouse Trap vs. Pac-Man

The Mouse Trap food chain.

Many differences between Pac-Man and Mouse Trap are aesthetic: the dots become cheese, the player is a mouse, the ghosts are cats, and the power pills are bones that turn the player into a dog. The combination of two player forms has the effect of creating a relatively complex food chain for a video game. However, there are functional differences as well:

The player can open and close the yellow, red and blue sets of doors at the press of a button. Large square buttons of the appropriate colors are used to control the doors.
The player can "store" the dog bones (Power Pellets) and use them at his or her discretion instead of right away. A fourth button - a large round "Doggie Button" with a picture of the dog's head on it - controls this transformation.
The four ghosts are replaced by six identical cats. They are worth 100 points for the first cat eaten, 300 for the second, 500 for the third, 700 for the fourth, and 900 for the fifth and subsequent cats. (Point values reset when another bone is used). Each cat eaten spawns a new and slightly-faster cat in its wake.
There is a seventh monster, a hawk, who will eat the player as both mouse and dog. Only the "In" field in the middle of the screen can stop the hawk (by causing it to move randomly instead of chasing the mouse), but this will beam the mouse back into one of the 4 areas in the corners, possibly right into a crowd of cats.
The "prizes" (bonus point items) do not appear at certain intervals, but are instead constantly available. Eating one triggers the next in the series to appear. There are thirty-two in all: a wedge of swiss cheese, a paperclip, a safety pin, a key, an apple, a trophy, a candlestick, a pair of scissors, a pair of pliers, a pair of eyeglasses, a clock, a bottle, a gem, a bugle, a screw, a hammer, a diamond ring, a light bulb, a sewing needle, a fork, a thimble, a knife, a cocktail glass, a fishbone, a pear, a peanut, a die, a telephone handset, a die with "C A F" on the faces, a spool of thread, a teacup, and a pistol. Point values start at 1000 for the first prize and increase by 200 for each subsequent prize, with the last prize being worth 7200 points. When all the prizes are eaten, the series just starts over with a 1000-point wedge of cheese.
There is a 10,000-point bonus for clearing the board of all cheese (as opposed to no bonus for advancing in Pac-Man). Ending a stage as a dog causes the player to begin the next stage still as a dog.

[edit] Ports

Coleco faithfully ported Mousetrap to its own ColecoVision console, though with options to leave the hawk out and somewhat odd sound effects (the cats sounded like a train whistle and the dog likewise sounded like the "chugga-chugga" of a stereotypical train engine), as well as significantly fewer prizes. Coleco's Intellivision version added an audio warning that a cat is about to enter the maze, and suffers from blocky graphics (like most Coleco-made Intellivision ports) but the gameplay is true to the arcade.

Coleco also ported Mouse Trap to the Atari 2600, with somewhat dropped graphics and simplified gameplay. The game has a more squat maze with brighter walls, and the sets of doors flicker rather than being multi-coloured. Also, the bones are far larger and the cheese is more nondiscript. The basics of gameplay are the same (eat all the cheese while avoiding the cats, turning into a dog, and so on), but the hawk, the IN door, and the bonus prizes are missing, there are fewer cats (three instead of six), and, since there is only one "color" of door, they all move together. Scoring is also reduced significantly (cheese is worth 1 instead of 10, cats are worth 10 points instead of an increasing value depending on the number eaten, and clearing a maze is only 100 points). [1]