Spot: The Video Game
- Brand
- 7 Up
- Year
- 1990
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Simulation & Strategy
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- Virgin Mastertronic
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
The player starts at a title screen featuring Spot, 7 Up's red-dot mascot in sunglasses, gloves, and sneakers, then moves into a setup menu (styled as a TV with channel-flipping animated previews on NES).
- 2
The player configures the match: up to four participants each assigned a color, any mix of human or AI opponents, one of five AI difficulty levels, and optional house rules such as a per-turn timer or blocked-off board squares.
- 3
The player picks a board layout from 512 preset configurations or draws a custom one in a built-in board editor before play begins.
- 4
Play takes place on a 7x7 grid where each participant starts with one piece in a corner; on a turn the player selects one of their pieces and an empty square one or two spaces away.
- 5
Moving one square clones the piece, leaving the original in place and adding a new one; moving two squares relocates the piece, vacating its old square.
- 6
Any opposing pieces adjacent to the newly placed piece flip to the mover's color, so a single move can capture several enemy pieces at once.
- 7
Each move is illustrated by Spot himself performing one of over a dozen animations (rolling, cartwheeling, pole-vaulting, breakdancing, falling, diving) depending on the move's direction and distance, and turns rotate among players, with local multiplayer passing the controller between participants.
- 8
The Game Boy version strips the game to two players in grayscale shades with minimal animation (pieces simply spread to fill a square) and uses a flipping Spot on the title screen to signal whose turn it is.
- 9
A match ends when the board is full or one side has no pieces left; whoever holds the most squares wins, and the game closes on an ending screen where Spot sticks out his tongue, set against a fireworks-lit stadium in the NES version.
Objective
7 Up wanted to carry its Spot mascot campaign — running on TV since 1987 — off the screen and onto the home consoles and computers its teenage audience actually owned. The NES cartridge doubled as a sales driver: it was sold by mail order against proof of purchase, four labels from specially marked 7 Up bottles.
Solution
Each match takes place on a 7×7 board shared by up to four players, human or computer-controlled. Players take turns placing or jumping their colored Spot piece to flip adjacent squares to their side, and every move triggers a short animation of Spot in sunglasses and sneakers — rollerskating, pole-vaulting, breakdancing — depending on the direction and distance of the play. A game runs just a few minutes, often passed hot-seat between players, with options to set the number of human versus AI opponents, pick one of five AI difficulty levels, add a per-turn timer, block off certain squares, or load one of 512 preset layouts. The Game Boy version strips this down to two-player, grayscale, with almost no animation.
Can you still play it?
Sources
There's no official way to play Spot: The Video Game today—no re-release ever came from Virgin Mastertronic or 7 Up, and no branded site or servers exist (it was simply sold in boxes in 1990-92). The 1990 MS-DOS release survives in the Internet Archive's software library and runs in-browser via emulation; original NES, Game Boy and computer cartridges and discs otherwise require old hardware. No withdrawal date or reason is documented—it simply fell out of print.
