Oil's Well (1990)

Oil's Well takes the classic subterranean dot-munching of Anteater and dresses it up in 256-color VGA graphics, but its bizarre control scheme turns every drop of crude into a high-stakes gamble.

Steering the pipe through the maze in Oil's Well

You control a mechanical drill bit attached to an expanding, snaking pipeline, plunging deep into subterranean dirt to drain white oil dots. The catch is your trailing tail. While your drill head can eat crawling subterranean pests like ants and termites head-on for bonus points, any enemy that brushes against the exposed pipe behind you instantly destroys your rig. The moment an enemy gets dangerously close to your flank, pressing the retractor key instantly zaps the drill bit straight back up to the surface, clearing the screen's tunnels but sacrificing your hard-won forward progress.

Hazard placement forces you to constantly weigh speed against caution. Bombs and anvils act as inverse hazards compared to the creeping bugs: if your drill bit hits them face-first, you blow up and lose a life, but they pass over your trailing pipeline completely harmlessly. A blinking white circle sits deep in the maze as a high-value collectible, tempting you to stretch your neck to its absolute limit right as a row of termites patrols the line above you.

How Sierra revamped a 1983 arcade clone for 1990 MS-DOS

Originally created by Thomas J. Mitchell in 1983, the original game ran on everything from the Apple II to the Commodore 64. For this 1990 1990 release, developer Banana Development, Inc. and publisher Sierra On-Line, Inc. gave the game a complete audiovisual makeover without Mitchell's involvement. Programmers including Bill Sargent upgraded the tech to support MCGA and VGA displays, while artists Nancy Hoffelmeyer and Andy Hoyos drew colorful underground environments. Composer Ken Allen provided a stereo soundtrack that sounded surprisingly crisp on AdLib and Sound Blaster cards compared to the squeaky PC speaker output of the past.

The developers also added animated inter-level cutscenes featuring Slater the Petrosaur, a homeless dinosaur displaced underground by environmental destruction. Between each of the eight levels, you get a short cartoon break of Slater's antics before a drill bit violently interrupts him. The game even wraps up its campaign with a subtle nod to the Three Stooges line "All's well that ends well" rewritten as "Oil is well."

Where the mouse controls drag the action down

Despite the massive presentation leap, this version stumbled hard on basic input mechanics. Instead of letting you use standard keyboard arrow keys or a digital joystick to navigate the grid like the 1983 original, the developers forced a mouse-driven point-and-click movement scheme. To move the drill, you click on the tunnel junction you want to travel toward, leaving your head to automatically path to the nearest clicked location.

In a fast-paced action game where split-second directional changes are the difference between snatching a bonus dot and snapping your pipe, point-and-click pathfinding feels completely detached. Period magazines reacted coolly, with Germany's Power Play issuing a low 33% rating in early 1991. Modern players on abandonware sites regularly vent about the controls, noting that forcing mouse navigation onto a tile-based maze arcade game makes the movements feel frustrating and clumsy when things get frantic.

Why you should play Oil's Well free in your browser today

The design behind 1990's Oil's Well sits right on the line between 1980s arcade urgency and the early 1990s push for upgraded color and sound card audio. If you can get used to the odd mouse controls, pushing a giant, fragile pipe down through monster-infested dirt creates a constant test of nerve.

You can play Oil's Well online right now, running the Oil's Well MS-DOS game free in your browser with no setup required. Test your reflexes against the subterranean pests, watch Slater's animated mid-level breaks, and see if you can clear all eight levels without snagging your pipeline on a stray termite.