Pushing against a wall causes it to vibrate and temporarily stuns any Sno-Bees in contact with it; the player may then crush them with a block or simply run over them to destroy them.

Bonus points are awarded for forming a continuous vertical or horizontal line of these blocks: 10,000 if none of them are touching a wall, or 5,000 otherwise.

If the player survives for two minutes without either losing a life or completing the round, all active Sno-Bees become Blobs.

Their movement speed increases and they will move directly toward one of the walls, crushing all ice blocks in their path.

[6] Game Machine later listed Pengo in their June 1, 1983 issue as the fifteenth top-grossing table arcade cabinet of the month.

[9] Computer and Video Games (C&VG) magazine gave it a highly positive review upon release, calling it "the cutest of coin-operated video games" and praising the "wonderful graphics, delightful characterisation, plenty of scope to work out your own" tactics, "catchy melody" and "that feeling of satisfaction you get when an ice-block picks up speed and knocks all the wind out of a surprised sno-bee!"

[3] In 1982 and 1983 Bandai Electronics created two[10][11] official Sega licensed handheld games featuring Pengo.

In 1995 a brand new game called Pepenga Pengo was released for the Sega Mega Drive only in Japan.

[20][21][22] Contemporaraneous Pengo clones include Orca's Penga,[23] Pengi for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, Percy Penguin for the Commodore 64,[24] Block Buster for the VIC-20, Chilly Willy for the Microbee,[25] Pengon for the TRS-80 Color Computer,[26] the unrelated Pengon for Atari 8-bit computers,[27] Pengy for the Atari ST,[28] Freez'Bees[29] and Do-Do for the ZX Spectrum, Stone Age for the VTech CreatiVision, and Pango for MS-DOS.