Whack-a-mole is one of those games so familiar you'd never imagine it has a real origin story. Yet the story of Whac-A-Mole (its international name) begins with a Japanese prototype that, at first, didn't even work.

A broken Japanese prototype, in 1976

It all happens at the 1976 IAAPA convention (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) in Orlando, USA. A Japanese company called TOGO presents a brand-new game called "Mogura Taiji" — literally "mole extermination". The concept is already there: mechanical moles pop up from holes, and the player must hit them with a mallet. The problem: the Japanese machine barely works, its springs being unreliable.

An American inventor takes over the idea

A carnival operator named Denny Denton spots the faulty machine and calls on a 22-year-old inventor, Aaron Fechter, to make it work. Fechter designs a new system based on pneumatic (compressed air) cylinders to pop the moles up much more reliably than the original springs. He's the one who gives the game its final name: Whac-A-Mole.

From the fairground to pop culture

The first working machine is sold in 1977 to an amusement park in Arizona. The game then spreads through carnivals, then amusement parks, then arcades in the early 1980s. It becomes so popular that it goes beyond the game itself: the expression "playing whack-a-mole" is now used in many languages to describe a situation where solving one problem instantly makes another pop up elsewhere — an image directly borrowed from the game.

The GozoGozo version

Our Whack-a-Mole revives the original concept without the mechanical moles or foam mallet: nine holes, a mole popping up at random, and 30 seconds to score as many points as possible by clicking as fast as you can.