PixlBit

When Pac-Man finally took off in popularity after its introduction to the US in 1980, it spawned a lot of competition; after all, Pac-Man is still the single most successful arcade game in history. While some were straight up clones of Pac-Man - Atari took Magnavox to court over K.C. Munchkin, their Pac-Man clone for the Odyssey - other games tried to come up with unique twists. 

One such game was Mouse Trap, released in 1981 by Exidy, a California-based arcade company known for games like Targ and the controversial 1970s arcade game Death Race. After the 1983 video game crash and the 1985 introduction of the NES, Exidy's output was limited to light-gun games like Crossbow and Cheyenne, and they closed up shop in 1989. However, a few of their games, including Mouse Trap and Venture, were staples of the ColecoVision. Mouse Trap was not a hit in the arcades, though it did get its own song on Buckner and Garcia's famous album, Pac-Man Fever. 

In Mouse Trap, the Pac-Man concept was turned into the cartoon cat/mouse/dog dynamic. You played as a mouse trying to eat every piece of cheese in the maze, while being pursued by six hungry cats. The power pellets were replaced by bones which would temporarily turn you into a dog, allowing you to attack the cats and return them to their starting places, after which you woud turn back into a mouse. It's one of only two Golden Age arcade games I can think of with cats in it, the other being Namco's Mappy. 

Beyond this theme, Mouse Trap had a few gameplay differences. For one thing, the maze had colored gates throughout, which by pushing buttons on the arcade console you could move between two positions, trying to block off the six cats. In addition, the bones were not immediately used when picked up, but were stored and activated at the push of a button, and unused bones would even carry over to the next level. There were also bonus prizes that would pop up in the maze. Mouse Trap had another unique element: an even more powerful enemy than the cats. A hawk would periodically appear, being able to fly over the walls, and not only could it eat the mouse, it could even kill you when you were transformed into a dog. There was no way to strike back against the hawk; in order to make it go away, you would have to maneuver into the blue "in" box in the center of the maze which would warp you to one of the corners of the maze. This would make the hawk "stupid," in the words of the game, i.e. make it fly randomly about and then temporarily fly away.

As with a lot of Exidy's games, Mouse Trap was rather graphically simple, if colorful. The sound effects included computerized meows, barks, and hawk screeches (which sounded more like how monkeys sound in movies.) It also played a few electronic ditties that had a style distinctive of Exidy games - Venture had the same style of music.

As an early 80s arcade game produced by a long-defunct American publisher that established no presence on the NES, Mouse Trap is virtually unknown today. Exidy's founder did release some of the company's games, including Targ and Spectar, onto a MAME site with his blessing for people to play them as along as they didn't use the ROMS commercially. However, Mouse Trap and Venture were not among these games. Nevertheless, it shouldn't be too hard to find this interesting game on a ROM site. As a Pac-Man clone, it was one of Pac-Man's more clever competitors. It was one of the games I loaded onto my homemade Raspberry Pi mini arcade machine.