QbertSteps

While hiking through the desert on vacation from his glamorous job as engineer at IGN Entertainment, Geoff Fortytwo stubbed his big toe on a square blue stone that was sticking up slightly out of the sandy ground. Curious, Geoff called in some favors from an archaeologist friend that he had saved the life of during a firefight in Viet Nam.

In just a few short weeks they had dug out the sand and discovered that these were in fact the original Q*bert stairs which were built by the ancient QueBerrta people about 4000 years ago.

Discovered near the stairs were the remains of the infamous creature known as Q*bert as well as the remains of the vicious snake Coily. In life Q*bert was a 10 foot tall orange egg shaped monster with a huge tubular nose. He wiled away the days attempting to paint the steps of the Q*bert stairs without being killed by Coily. Coily was an evil creature who disliked nice paint jobs and did all he could to prevent Q*bert from doing a good job painting the stairs.

Tours of the stairs can be arranged by appointment.

Here we start with the wood blocks that I cut to use to create the plaster mold.

Here is the resulting plaster mold.

Plaster sure is messy!

Here I put the plaster mold together with its wooden sides and then put cement in it to make the steps of the pyramid.

Cement isn't good for the hands.

The results!

The two people here are the instructors in my cement casting class at The Crucible.

An ancient Q*bert pyramid wouldn't be complete without the remains of Q*bert and Coily.

Here it is on display in the break room at IGN.com.

Random Info

• The cement Q*bert steps weigh 124 pounds.
• The plaster mold weighs 69 pounds.
• The wooden blocks used to create the mold weigh 39 pounds.