2026-07-04 · retro-review
Mole Mania (1996) — What a Two-Layer Board of Surface and Underground Taught Us
On July 21, 1996, Nintendo released Mole Mania for the Game Boy, developed by Nintendo EAD and Pax Softnica and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto. With four verbs — push, pull, throw, dig — you carry an iron ball to each screen's gate, across a board that exists in two layers: surface and underground. I dig up this forgotten work as an ancestor of the spatial reasoning found in today's multi-layer puzzles.