The game is written in K&R C with ncurses.
It seemed to start on 1991-07-10 (v1.3) by and was initially named "BUGS" or "BUGS I," which is displayed on pause screen.
On 1992-06-12, Scott Noecker released it under "Dr. Mario," same as Nintendo's Dr. Mario, see README.
On 1992-06-15, Ken Corey made some modification for Linux, see README.linux.
In November, 2015, Grandpa's Code attempted to continue. As of December, 2015, it conforms to C99 and POSIX.1b.
This game has been placed in Public Domain.