Mouse Trap is the maze arcade game Exidy released in 1981, with a structure very close to Pac-Man's but with its own identity: a mouse navigates a maze eating cheese while up to six cats chase it, with the ability to eat a bone and temporarily turn into a dog to reverse the chase, plus colored doors the player can open or close at will and a hawk that flies over the map ignoring the walls.
Coleco chose it as one of ColecoVision's launch titles in 1982, and from there it also jumped to Intellivision and the Atari 2600. Its most curious cultural legacy came from elsewhere: the duo Buckner & Garcia used its sound effects for the track "Mousetrap" on their album Pac-Man Fever, an entire record devoted to the early-'80s arcade craze.
If you liked this one
