It is similar to Pac-Man, with the main character replaced by a mouse, the dots with cheese, the ghosts with cats, and the energizers with bones.

The maze has three sets of color-coded doors, which the player can open or close by pressing the corresponding buttons in order to block the cats' approach.

Coleco ported Mouse Trap to its own ColecoVision console, with 15 prizes instead of 32, an option to leave the hawk out, and different sound effects.

[5] In his 1982 book How to Beat the Video Games Michael Blanchet said that Mousetrap's gameplay "closely resembles that of Pac-Man with a couple of very interesting twists".

[7] In 1982, Buckner & Garcia recorded the song "Mousetrap" using sound effects from the game and released it on the album Pac-Man Fever.

When they re-recorded the album in 1999, they were unable to find a machine and instead used dog and cat sounds recorded in a pet store.