Midway’s Prehistoric Arcade Oddity
Trog!, released by Midway Manufacturing in 1990, is one of the most distinctive arcade games of the early 1990s – and also one of the most overlooked. A colorful top-down maze game starring claymation-style dinosaurs, Trog! combined Pac-Man’s maze-chase DNA with a unique theme and multiplayer chaos that made it a cult favorite. It was ported to DOS and the Nintendo Entertainment System the same year, bringing its prehistoric mayhem to home audiences.
About This Classic
Midway – the Chicago-based manufacturer behind Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and Defender – developed Trog! at a time when arcade games were competing against increasingly powerful home consoles. The game’s visual hook was its characters: dinosaur-like creatures called Trogs, rendered in a stop-motion claymation style reminiscent of the California Raisins commercials. The main playable characters include Bluto (a blue T-Rex-like dinosaur), Spike (an orange triceratops), and Gwen (a purple pterodactyl-type).
The premise is pure arcade nonsense in the best possible way: one-eyed cavemen called the Ogres have stolen all the dinosaur eggs, and the Trogs must collect them back while avoiding being caught. Each level drops you into a maze filled with eggs, power-ups, and increasingly aggressive cavemen. The game supports up to four players simultaneously in the arcade version, making it one of the earliest four-player co-op games.
Gameplay and Tips
You control a Trog navigating a Pac-Man-style maze from a top-down perspective. Your goal on each level is to collect every egg scattered across the board while avoiding the cavemen patrolling the maze. Power-ups include pineapples (which let you eat cavemen temporarily), pepper (which increases speed), and chili (which makes you invincible). Some levels also feature warp holes and springboards that launch you to different parts of the map.
The DOS version offers a somewhat different experience from the arcade original – the four-player mode is absent, but the core maze-chase gameplay translates well to PC. The cavemen AI becomes more aggressive as levels progress, with later stages introducing cavemen that can anticipate your path rather than simply follow it.
Pro Tips
- Learn the power-up hierarchy: Pineapple is your primary offensive tool – grab it before entering areas with tight corridors where cavemen are likely to corner you. Chili (invincibility) should be saved for the final egg scramble when enemies are fastest.
- Map out egg clusters: In later levels, eggs are placed in dangerous corners and dead-end paths. Collect safe eggs first, build up power-ups, then tackle the risky zones. Rushing the dangerous eggs early is a fast way to lose a life.
- Use springboards defensively: Springboards are not just shortcuts – they are escape tools. If a caveman is closing in, spring to another part of the map. Memorize where each springboard lands so you never launch yourself into a worse situation.
- Watch the cavemen patterns, not the eggs: Like Pac-Man ghosts, each caveman type has distinct movement behavior. Some patrol fixed routes, others track toward your position, and the most dangerous ones try to cut off your escape paths.
Controls
- Arrow Keys: Move your Trog in four directions
- Ctrl/Alt/Space: Use collected power-up
Why It’s a Legend
Trog! occupies a special place in arcade history as one of the first games to successfully use stop-motion animation techniques for its characters, predating the claymation craze that would later influence games like ClayFighter and The Neverhood. The four-player cooperative mode was genuinely ahead of its time – years before Gauntlet Legends made multiplayer dungeon crawling a mainstream arcade attraction, Trog! was bringing four friends together around a single cabinet to collect eggs and beat up cavemen.
The game also represents Midway at the peak of its creative experimentation period, before the company shifted almost entirely toward fighting games in the post-Mortal Kombat era. In many ways, Trog! is a window into an alternate timeline where arcade developers continued to push genre-defying, whimsical concepts instead of converging on safe, proven formulas.
Did You Know?
- The stop-motion characters in Trog! were created by the same animation studio that produced the California Raisins commercials, giving the game its distinctive visual identity in a sea of sprite-based arcade competition.
- Trog! was bundled with the NES version of Super Off Road in some regions, making it one of the rarer NES cartridges sought by collectors today.
- The game’s title is simply “Gort” spelled backwards – a detail that has inspired decades of fan theories about what, if anything, “Gort” might refer to.
- The DOS port was handled by Acclaim Entertainment, which was at the time one of the largest publishers of home console and computer game ports from arcade properties.
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