PixlBit

One of my favorite games of the early 80s, Oil's Well, was a computer game made for early 80's 8-bit computers by Sierra On-Line. Its premise was that you had discovered oil (conveniently in the form of pellets), and you were trying to drill it before big-name oil barons pirated it from you.

Oil's Well was one of the many Pac-Man like games out at the time. Much later, I learned that it had a more direct arcade influence: a little-known game made by Stern Electronics, Anteater. Oil's Well ultimately ended up being much better known than its inspiration. In this game, your Pac-Man figure was a drill bit attached to a length of pipe. If you had to backtrack, you pushed the fire button to retract your drill bit quickly. Your object was to clear the maze of "oil pellets".

The main enemies in this game were colorful little gremlins. They moved horizontally across the screen, as did all other enemies/bonuses. Your drill bit would eat these gremlins readily without the use of power pellets, but if they touched your pipe, you would lose a life. This made moving in deeper tunnels more dangerous, since you would have more of the little gremlins to menace your pipe. The other enemies in the game included land mines, which worked the opposite way: they would kill your drill bit if you ate them, but they wouldn't hurt the pipe. There were also bonus "goblets" which would appear randomly. These were worth 1000 points if eaten and also wouldn't hurt your pipe. Unlike the fruits in Pac-Man, their appearances were random, so you could grab as many as you wanted. You had a time limit for each life in this game, so this kept players from simply staying in one level and farming goblets. 

There were 8 levels in this game, each of increasing complexity that would require your drill bit to mine pellets from a growing number of twisty little passages that would expose it to more danger from the little gremlins. On each level was a flashing pellet that would temporarily slow down the gremlins, and vaporize land mines and goblets. Once you cleared level 8, the mazes would restart at level 1, with the goblins traveling faster and the land mines traveling more slowly. 

Oil's Well was a fun little game and fairly popular in its day. Sierra kept putting remakes of it out until 1990, when they released a VGA PC version of the game. Sadly, it never got any release on consoles. The only way to play it these days is on emulators, as I'm guessing the rights to the game now belong to Activision, which has shown no interest in re-releasing the game.

And its inspiration...

I'm also going to talk a bit about the game it was cloned from, Anteater, which was made by Stern Electronics. In this game, you were an anteater raiding an anthill, the dots were ant larvae, and you had to eat bugs to prevent them from biting your tongue and killing you. There were worms which had poisonous heads and could be eaten from behind safely, and eating the queen ant would temporarily erase all enemies from the level. In this game, time limits were enforced by a day/night cycle, at which time a spider would appear and start crawling down your tongue, killing you when it reached the tip of your tongue. No official home ports of Anteater were ever released, so Oil's Well became much better known. According to Wikipedia, the world high score record for Anteater is held by Maria Blasucci, a TV actress.