Mister Bug (Commodore Amiga) - Games That Weren't

1992 Guido Gouweloos

Platform: Commodore Amiga

Mister Bug (aka Mr. Bug) is an unreleased Lady Bug-inspired arcade clone for the Commodore Amiga, developed during the early 1990s by Dutch coder Guido Gouweloos together with friends William van de Coolwijk and Jan van Rosmalen.

The project began around 1991/1992, when Guido was studying Computer Science and learning 68K assembler on the Amiga. While many of his peers were focused on creating demos, Guido wanted to apply his skills to a complete game.

When he met William, who had already drawn a full set of graphics for a Lady Bug–style project with Jan, the idea quickly took shape. Guido would handle programming, while William and Jan supplied the visuals and Ronald van Leeuwen later joined to create speech samples.

The game was completed in 1992, where the entire project was written in 68000 assembler, designed for the Amiga 500 and A1200 and coded directly to the hardware rather than relying on the operating system.

Guido estimates the project reached around 85–90% completion before work ceased on it. Missing elements include a title screen, the ability to select one or two players (the very last build Guido made runs in two-player alternating mode), returning to the title screen after play, high score saving and display, enemy tweaks and a proper end screen or animation.

Each level also supports a humorous tagline, though only the first level’s “Yeah, what’s up doc” was implemented. When recompiling, Guido added in some other alternative lines which you can find in the alternative ADF in the download. Despite these gaps, the game is otherwise fully playable – with all graphics, sound effects and core gameplay present.

A built-in trainer menu also exists and can be accessed by typing “marieke” during pause mode, though the system reads raw key positions rather than characters, meaning originally it was only working on original hardware, though Guido has fixed in the ADF below.

The most notable bug involves the flower counter mechanism, which occasionally fails to detect when all flowers have been eaten, preventing the level from ending. Guido suspects a decrement routine occasionally fails to trigger. Completing the words EXTRA and SPECIAL can trigger special features- the first awarding an extra life, the second a limited time of invisibility (using the joystick button).

Recently in 2025, Guido revisited his 1995 backups and located the full source code and external binary files, including graphics, bitmasks and samples. These were kindly shared with Games That Weren’t to get compiling for preservation. He also discovered a VHS capture of the game recorded from his A1200 back in 1995, which can be viewed here.

Galahad very kindly has spent a lot of time to piece the game together in a different assembler, and is creating a build of the game which will run on any Amiga (this will be added very soon). We’ve currently included also a version that Guido also compiled which had a few additional tweaks to the code (i.e. the added tag lines) – though this will not work on all machines. Check out Guido’s promising arcade clone for yourself!

Guido in the meantime continues to search for more assets on his original Amiga 1200 hard drive, which is due to be imaged by a Dutch Commodore user group. This may reveal missing material such as the original title picture or earlier artwork.

He is also keen to see Mr. Bug finished some day and made fully playable, and would welcome help from experienced Amiga coders who can tidy up remaining issues or rebuild it into a more robust, standalone version. Anyone interested in assisting can reach out via the Games That Weren’t contact form, and we will forward messages directly to him.

Thanks to Guido’s careful archiving and Galahad’s brilliant help to fix everything up, Mr. Bug has finally resurfaced after more than 30 years and we hope to see more from him very soon.

With a huge thank you to Guido Gouweloos and Galahad for helping to bring Mister Bug back to life!