Here's some interesting facts you might not know about Mappy. You know how we have slang terms for police officers like 'cops' and whatnot? Well they do in Japan, too. One of their slang terms for police is "mappo," and that's how they got the name Mappy!
Here's something I learned fairly recently. While Namco is best known for their arcade games, they've also dabbled in other amusements like robotics. There's the Chuck E. Cheese style PicPac Robot Band and the toy dinosaur "Wagyan" for instance. Both of those robots even appeared in games later on. But did you know that Nyamco and Mappy did NOT first appear in the arcade game? They were first robots!
In Japan in the 80s, a popular competition was to program robots to go through a maze. Namco first entered the foray with a robot cat named Nyamco. The next year they made a Mappy robot with a needle on its tail so it could pop balloons in the mazes, too. That's why in the bonus stages in Mappy, he pops balloons there as well. After the arcade Mappy was released, Namco made some smaller toy robots of them as well to sell to the public.
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