Tube-It: The Original Tube Puzzler
Tube-It screenshot from vgmuseum.comSome of the best arcade games ever created were simple puzzle games like Tube-It. The name may be unfortunate but it is at least fairly descriptive because the game was all about fitting tubes together. It was originally released by Taito in 1993 but they only brought it out in the arcades in Japan and it was called Cachat. It soon popped up on PCs across the world and made into lots of those classic arcade game collections. It is still an addictive wee title with a nice design.
Tube-It had a weird art style to stay the least. It was super colourful with rows of coloured notches which faced each other with a channel between. They went from red down to green at the bottom and the channel in the middle gradually filled up with sections of piping which fell from the top. Your aim was to quickly patch the piping together and match one side of the screen with the other so the same coloured notches were linked by pipes. You could rotate each section of pipe to try and make connections. If you managed to link it you’d see the coloured liquid flowing through the pipe.
The game also had a funny dancing mascot on the right hand side who would dance around as you battled away to connect pipes. He looked like some kind of tribesman. The game probably had some kind of daft back story, they used to make them up even for puzzle games, but it escaped me.
Tube-It was never especially popular in arcades but it did ok on PC and the basic principle of the design is quite good even if the execution is a little ropy. The idea of joining up pipes to create a flow from one side to another has been re-used elsewhere, most notably in the mini-game sections of the successful FPS Bioshock. They used it is a hacking mini-game to allow you to take control of various camera and bots in the game.
It works as a kind of sliding puzzle mixed with the Tetris style approach which adds a layer of complexity, and difficulty, over the Bioshock mini-game. It is actually a pretty tricky wee game and you can play it online if you’re curious although I can’t find a free version. If you want to try Tube-It out you might have to pay out a little cash for access on Game Tap. There are a few other classic arcade games there as well so a multi pass could prove a worthy investment.
The title Taito’s Legends which was released on PC, Xbox and PS2 also included Tube-It along with 28 other arcade classics. The gameplay has been ripped off in various flash games and as mini-games in larger titles and this is a pretty common practice when it comes to the old arcade classics. Mobile phone game developers and social media website game developers are quick to plagiarise and they never credit the original sources. If you see a tube style puzzler like this out there spare a thought for Tube-It.
