42. Do! Run Run

(Arcade/MSX, Universal, 1984)
The cherry-loving clown is the star of a series of arcade classics which in one way or another "borrow" liberally from other arcade classics, the fourth game of the series steals ideas from Qix, Pac-man, Congo Bongo, Mappy and the original game of the series, which in turn, stole from Dig-Dug. Even the game's title is stolen from a song.

Just one thing though. Mr Do! doesn't give a shit what you think.

The most punk rock of all the early video game heroes, Mr Do! spends his time in Do! Run Run running full pelt over a multi-tiered board, collecting Pac-Man's dots and drawing boxes around them with Qix's line in order to turn them into Super Pac's fruit products, he must do all this whilst avoiding Dig-Dug's dragons.
An incredibly frantic, fast-paced and frankly confusing game, Do! Run Run sees the player either gather the dots or take the time to draw a box around them in order to turn them into various high-scoring fruits. Chased by several monsters, Mr Do! can either throw a ball at his enemies or crush them under rolling logs. A board is cleared once all the dots/fruit are collected or all the monsters are killed. After a set period of time, the monsters change design and speed up. On top of all this, collecting letters makes MORE monsters appear which Mr Do! must defeat to collect MORE letters to earn an extra life.

Mr Do! loves to plagiarise, but he does it with such style and fashion that you can't help but love the little bastard, this disregard for copyright law, coupled with his ability to create some of the surrealist arcade classics ever, make Mr Do!, in my eyes, one of the damn coolest characters to exist in videogames. Do! Run Run is so rebel yell it even has a hidden diamond which gives the player a free credit. Take that Mappy you police-mouse prick.

Finally, the game has awesome music, with the game's first board wailing out one of my favourite pieces of frantic VGM ever. To summarise, Mr. Do! is so hardcore he got his own Neo-Geo game, he is a clown who eats cherries, owns a castle, crushes Dragons and has an exclamation mark in his name. Rumours persist that if you fail to leave cherries outside the Taito offices, he turns up in your bed at night....

...With a knife.

I love Mr Do!, My girlfriend CALLS ME "MR. DO!"
When a girl pet names you after a small pixellated ball throwing clown from 1984, it doesn't get any better than that, my friends.