Cheeky Mouse, published by Universal Games in 1980, is a very simple game, but an excellent example of classic arcade style. In Cheeky Mouse, you play as a man with a hammer, and your only goal is to kill the mice before they take all 8 of your pieces of cheese. A thin line on the bottom third of the screen serves both as the floor you walk on and the barrier the mice must chew through in order to steal your cheese. One whack will suffice to eliminate a mouse, but over time the waves grow in number, and the tension rises as eight mice carry out a synchronized attack on your cheese stash. Mice spawn from the top of the screen, and take random, curving paths down to the floor. The player is confined to a single horizontal row on the screen, while the mice are free to crawl about. This way, the player can only attack mice who are actively chewing through the floor or while they are coming back up from under the floor to return the cheese. This creates a sense of urgency, because once the mice pass the player’s area, they must watch them scurry away with their cheese, forced to witness but unable to stop the theft. Additionally, some levels have windows in the center of the screen, which block the mice from sight as they change trajectory, so the player won’t know where the mouse will emerge from.
Cheeky Mouse has only 3 buttons: left, right, and whack. This makes the game very easy to learn, but mastering it is tricky. Players must learn to prioritize which mice to hit first, as speed limitations of the player character sometimes make it impossible to eliminate all mice before they chew through the floor. If a mouse does make it through, the player can retrieve their stolen cheese by whacking the mouse as it crawls back out. But the player must be careful not to let too many mice through, as it takes several seconds for a mouse to chew down through the floor, but they are only within whacking range for a split second as they crawl back out.
Each coin gives the player 3 lives, and if they die (by having all their cheese stolen) then they resume at the same place in the wave for that level, but with all 8 pieces of cheese back. This way, the player doesn’t lose all their progress and feels motivated to continue playing. As the threat of mice is unending, this game could be played infinitely, with the mice increasing in speed and number as the player advances through each level. In Richard Rouse’s article Centipede, he identified classic arcade games as being short, replayable, and easy to understand. Additionally, they use a single screen, employ simple gameplay, and feature infinite play with multiple lives and a scoring system. Cheeky Mouse checks all these boxes, making this simple game about whacking mice a good example of the genre.
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