Mr. Do's Castle

Name:	Mr. Do's Castle
Company:	Parker Brothers
Model #:	1020
Programmer:	Jack Verson (On-Time Software)
Year:	1984
Released?	Yes (Canada only)
Notes:	The cartridge version had a limited release in Canada

Mr. Do is back, and this time he's got a castle (I guess he got tired of living underground).  Unfortunately he's discovered that Unicorns like to live in his castle too.  But these aren't cute white creatures of fantasy movies, these are nasty two legged squat monsters with horns on their heads.  Armed only with his magic hammer Mr. Do must smash blocks on top of the Unicorns heads in order to rid his castle of them forever.  Mr. Do can also smash out floor tiles to make holes for the Unicorns to fall into, but bopping Unicorns through holes only makes them angry, and they will multiply.

There are three types of Unicorns: Red, Yellow, and Green (shouldn't yellow and blue make green?).  Red Unicorns are the normal grunts, slow and easy to kill.  Yellow unicorns spawn from Red Unicorns that have been smashed through floor tiles or left alone too long, these guys are a little faster and a little smarter than their Red cousins.  Green Unicorns come from, you guessed it, Yellow Unicorns!  Green Unicorns are the absolute worst because they're lightning fast and too smart to fall for most of your tricks.  They also have a bad tendency to multiply when your not looking. 

There are two ways to beat each board.  Mr. Do can either destroy all the Unicorns (this is normally how you win), or he can bash out all the Cherry blocks scattered around the level.  Hitting all the Cherry blocks is very difficult to do, but is sometimes the wiser way to go once the Unicorns get out of control.  You can also use Skull blocks to kill the Unicorns, these blocks appear on either end of a row of blocks.  Smashing both Skull blocks will cause all the blocks in between to fall crushing many Unicorns at once.  The area in between is then replaced by a slatted bridge which cannot be smashed out.  Also scattered around the level are three Key blocks, smashing all three Keys will open the doors at the top of the screen.  Inside this door is a magic coat of arms which will turn all the Unicorns into those funny Lettermen (from Mr. Do!).  Smashing these Lettermen with your hammer will not only eliminate a Unicorn, but will score you a letter.  Spell out the word EXTRA and you'll get an extra life.  

While the 8-bit version of Mr. Do's Castle isn't bad, it could have been much better.  The gameplay is there, but the graphics are decidedly average (the Unicorns actually look better in the 2600 version!) and there are a few control issues.  It is unknown why the Atari 8-bit version had such a limited release, but it may have been due to the collapsing 8-bit market and the relative expensive of a cartridge release.  Parker Brothers did put Mr. Do's Castle out on disk, as a disk release was much cheaper (Montezuma's Revenge was released in the same fashion). 

Interestingly it appears that a limited cartridge release did occur.  The label isn't the normal production label, but rather a plain white sticker with the game logo on it.  The manual and box are both bilingual so it is believed that these were only released in Canada.  It is unknown why PB decided to do this, but it may be that they already had one run of carts made before deciding to cancel the release.  So in order to recoup some of the cost they may have decided to dump them in Canada (where the market was stronger).  The odd label may be due to the fact that the labels hadn't been made yet and PB didn't want to go through the expense of having nice color labels made so they made a quick and dirty one.  These carts are extremely rare and only a handful have turned up over the years.

Special thanks to Atari8BitCarts for providing pictures of this incredibly rare release.

Cartridge

Manual

Box

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