Played to keep playing
No last level. No final boss. Just down.
Digger!! takes the classic dig-and-pump arcade loop and removes the walls. The world runs forever left, right and down. You dig, spray, drop junk on things, and keep going for as long as the city lets you.
The philosopher James Carse split games in two: finite games, played to win, and infinite games, played so the play can continue.Digger!! is part of the Infinite Games series, alongside Infinite Words: classic games rebuilt to be explored rather than finished.
Dig through time
The underground is a vertical history of the city.
Every layer you cut through is an older version of the neighborhood. Dig far enough and you start finding rooms: a basement, a bathroom, a bar where last call was a while ago. History doesn't stay in its lane, either. There's a shopping cart at 700 m. Nobody knows how.
Living City
Fiber cable, earbuds, e-scooter parts, traffic cones, bottle caps
Recent City
Payphones, cassettes, parking meters, newspapers, an old office
Old Neighborhood
Clawfoot tubs, skeleton keys, teacups, a nursery with a rocking horse
Industrial City
Gears, barrels, riveted pipes big enough to walk through
Transit City
Turnstiles, train wheels, a tiled platform where the next train is never
Victorian City
Cobblestones, gas lamps, carriage wheels, brick sewers
Gold Rush Port
Anchors, chains, crates, the hull of a ship that made a wrong turn
Before the City
Creek beds, shells, roots, stones, bones
Deep Time
Ammonites, trilobites, glowing crystals, and an eye that should not be there
…and somewhere below that, 100,000 m down.
What's down there
Rats, reapers, and a running commentary.
18 urban monsters
From rats and roaches at street level to killers, gators and reapers deep down. Some spit venom, some slash, some drift straight through the dirt.
Spray them till they pop
Pump a monster up with your water tank, or dig under a shopping cart and drop it on three of them at once.
Buried rooms
Basements, bars, subway platforms and ship hulls hide in the dirt and reveal themselves one shovelful at a time. Someone usually still lives there.
Every run gets its own slang era, from GROOVY to NO CAP to BY GUM. Hundreds of phrases, almost never the same headline twice.
Power-ups
Holy symbols for extra lives, pills for longer or all-way spray, and a bong that leaves every monster on screen too dazed to bother you.
Boom-bap underground
Record scratches when you spray, air horns when junk lands on a crowd, and a tape-stop rewind when it all goes wrong.
The contact sheet
Can you dig it?
Every sprite in the game on one page: the raccoon, all 18 monsters (normal, inflated and drifting), 10 kinds of falling junk, 10 power-ups, 57 buried objects and 16 buried structures.
Tap the sheet to see it full size. Think you could draw a better gator? Make your own below.
Draw your own
Make a sheet. Your monsters could end up underground.
Redraw the whole cast or just one rat. Favorite sheets get built into the game as new skins and new creatures, credited to you.
Grab the template
A printable grid with a labeled box for the raccoon, every monster, the junk and the power-ups, plus wildcards for your own ideas.
Draw
Pen, paint, pixels or collage. Bold silhouettes read best at game size. Monsters should face right.
Upload
Photo or scan is fine. PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF or PDF, up to 20 MB.