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Pac-Man

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The Pac-Man arcade game begins with the enemies in the middle of the screen and Pac-Man below. Four power pills are among the dots to be eaten.

Pac-Man is a video arcade game created by Namco game designer Toru Iwatani.

Pac-Man was first introduced in Japan in the autumn of 1980, and it was an instant hit. It was soon picked up for manufacture in the U.S. by Midway Games, and became a worldwide phenomenon within the video game industry, as it shattered the popular conventions set in the field by Space Invaders. It abandoned the 'shoot-em-up action' in favor of a unique, humorous, largely non-violent format that appealed to girls as well as boys.

The name of the game derives from the Japanese onomatopoeic word paku, which is the sound of opening and closing one's mouth. The name was romanized as Puck-Man in Japan, but the spelling was changed to Pac-Man for the U.S. market by Midway for fear that vandals would partially erase the arc of the 'P' to resemble an 'F' leaving an English curse word.

Description

Pac-Man is a maze game where the character Pac-Man, a yellow circle with a mouth, has to navigate a maze while eating dots and prizes. A level, or board, is finished when all dots are eaten. Four ghost-like monsters also wander the maze in an attempt to eat Pac-Man. The monsters had names and nicknames which were: Shadow (Blinky), Speedy (Pinky), Bashful (Inky), and Pokey (Clyde). They are red, pink, aqua and orange in color, respectively—in the original Puck-Man, these monsters were named Akabei (red-guy), Pinky, Aosuke (blue-guy), and Guzuta (slow-guy). Four special dots, called energizers or powerpills, near the corners of the maze provide Pac-Man with the temporary ability to eat the monsters—all four of which turn a deep blue while they are subject to being eaten. The monsters then go back "home"—a box in the center of the maze)—to regenerate. The amount of time the monsters remain vulnerable after the energizers are hit varies from one board to the next, but the time period generally trends shorter as the game progresses, and after many boards have been completed the monsters will actually not turn blue at all when the energizers are contacted. Intermissions between some boards show humorous animated cut-scenes featuring Pac-Man and the monsters. These animations occur between Boards 2 and 3, 5 and 6, 9 and 10, and then following every four completed boards thereafter.

Additionally, points can be earned by having Pac-Man run over a symbol (generically referred to as fruit, even though a couple are not technically "fruit") that appears twice during each board just below the box in the center of the maze from which the monsters emerge. The symbols change with each successive one or two boards, and their point value steadily increases; a pair of cherries, which is used on the first board, is worth only 100 points, while the last symbol to appear, a key, counts 5,000.

There are precisely 255 completely playable boards in the game, corresponding with the highest possible number achieved through eight-digit binary. Although, technically, there is a 256th board, the right side of the screen becomes a garbled mess of text on this level, rendering the game virtually unplayable. Pac-Man enthusiasts refer to this as the "Final Level," the "Split-Screen Level," or simply as the ending of Pac-Man. Although there are claims that someone with enough knowledge of the maze pattern can play through it, it is generally considered unbeatable (see "Historical events" below).

Arcade system information

The game used a Z80 microprocessor and a Namco 3-channel PSG for sounds. Both standard upright and cocktail versions existed. A plugin kit called Super ABC became available in the 1990s which added several new games to the Pac-Man system, including different versions of the original Pac-Man.

Implementation

The movements of the monsters are strictly deterministic—there is no random or even pseudo-randomness in the algorithms choosing their paths. Therefore, the game can be played indefinitely by learning and repeating a specific sequence of movements for each level (termed "patterns"). A later revision of the programming altered the behavior, but it still wasn't random, and thus new patterns were devised for it.

A disastrous port

File:PacManCrt260007052004.jpg
The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man was a substandard disaster.

The first attempt to adapt Pac-Man to the home video game market was a disastrous failure. Atari Inc. bought the home video rights to the game, and it promoted the release of the Atari 2600 version of the game with an enormous marketing campaign. In the eyes of the public, the combination of the world's most popular home video game console with the world's most popular arcade game seemed like a "can't miss" blockbuster. However, the actual Atari 2600 adaptation of the game turned out to be (according to its critics) stiff, lifeless, and it somehow managed to remove the colorful, "fun" aspect of Pac-Man from the game. It was one of two major home video game releases (along with the Atari 2600 version of E.T.) that triggered the so-called video game crash of 1983.

Reports have it that the miserable port of the game to the 2600 was largely due to an overzealous Atari marketing department. As Atari planned for the development of Pac-Man for the 2600, some marketing executives approached one of their principal game programmers, Tod Frye, about doing a version of the game. He said he already had a prototype developed and showed it to them. It suffered from a flashing screen and other shortcomings and lacked polish. But the executives were so eager to start selling the game that they overlooked its flaws and ordered production of the game based on the unfinished prototype. Unfortunately for them, the public did not overlook its blemishes and instead purchased similar offerings from competing video game publishers.

Atari allegedly paid Frye $1 million to produce the game in contrast to Toru Iwatani, who was only paid his usual salary for creating the original arcade game.

Legacy

Marketers from the video game manufacturers were taken completely by surprise by the phenomenal success of Pac-Man in 1980. Interviews with programmers who worked in the industry during the initial "golden age" of video games revealed that marketing executives completely overlooked the game (and likewise dismissed the classic Defender as "too complex"), while they looked to a racing car game called Rally-X as the game to beat that year. But the appeal of Pac-Man caught on immediately with the gaming public, and the game's popularity outpaced anything seen in the industry before; it even surpassed Space Invaders as the most popular and most influential game of the 1980s.

The unique and original game design inspired game manufacturers to look into game designs that differed from endless "alien invader battle" games. Pac-Man introduced an element of humor into video games that designers sought to imitate, as it appealed to a wider demographic than the teenage boys who flocked to the action-oriented games. Many popular video games of the 1980s, including Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, and Frogger owe their existence to the success of Pac-Man.

Pac-Man spawned numerous spin-off and imitative games. Its 'official' arcade lineage includes Ms. Pac Man, Pac Man Plus, Super Pac Man, Jr. Pac Man, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, the Baby Pac-Man video/pinball game, and the Professor Pac-Man trivia game. Unauthorized "pirate" versions of the game were also created, most notably Hangly-Man, one variant of which replaced the Pac-Man character with the head of Popeye. In addition, soon after the release of the original Pac-Man, many other maze-themed video games entered the arcade market (Make Trax and Thief being the most prominent) and one such game, K.C. Munchkin, was actually withdrawn after Namco threatened to sue its creator, since its imitation of the Pac-Man characters was so blatant and undisguised.

A great deal of Pac-Man merchandise was marketed in the 1980s, from t-shirts to toys to hand-held video game imitations. A Saturday morning TV cartoon based on the game was produced by Hanna-Barbera that lasted 2 years from 1982 to 1984 and there was also a Pac-Man Christmas special called "Christmas Comes to Pac-Land"; the bad guys were Ghost-Monsters named Blinky, Pinky, Inky, Clyde, and Sue (from the Ms. Pac-Man game), and were led by the evil Mezmaron. Marty Ingels played the voice of Pac-Man. The game also inspired a 1982 hit single, "Pac-Man Fever," performed by Buckner & Garcia.

The KLOV lists Pac-Man as the #1 video game of all time on its "The Top 100 Videogames" list.

In 2003 a new version of the game for the Nintendo Gamecube allowed four players to play simultaniously called Pac-Man Vs. One player uses the Game Boy Advance to view the entire Pac-Man maze and control Pac-Man, while 3 other players using the TV screen and traditional GameCube controllers to control one ghost each. The players that controlled the ghosts were only allowed to see the small part of the maze that was around them, limiting the view of the ghost players. This showcased Nintendo's connectivity feature between the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance, and was given away free with the Player's Choice rereleased version of Pac-Man World 2 as well as Namco's I-Ninja and R: Racing Revolution games for GameCube.

In 2004, New York University's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program created a "real world" version of the game called "Pac-Manhattan" where one player runs around the streets of New York City dressed as Pac-Man and collects "virtual dots" (there are no physical representations of the dots in the streets, but a map on a central computer knows where Pac-Man has been and, therefore, which streets have been "cleared"). Four other players play the part of the monsters. Pac-Man (or the monsters when Pac-Man has eaten a power pill by touching a streetsign at certain intersections) are killed by tagging (touching with the hands). Each player has a controller counterpart in constant cell phone contact and are monitored from a centralized location using Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team.

Historical events

A perfect Pac-Man game, in which the player must complete all of the 255 levels with a maximum point score without ever being eaten, was first played in 1999 by Billy Mitchell. The maximum score is 3,333,360 points.

However, in December 1982, an eight-year-old boy named Jeffrey R. Yee received a letter from U.S. President Ronald Reagan, congratulating him on a worldwide record of 6,131,940 points, a score only possible if the player passed through the Split-Screen Level. Whether or not this event happened as described has remained in heated debate amongst video game circles since its occurrence. Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 to anyone who could provably pass through the Split-Screen Level before January 1, 2000; no one could.

Trivia

  • Pac-Man, and other video games of the same general type, are often cited as an identifying cultural experience of Generation X, particularly its older members, sometimes called Baby Busters.
  • The secret level of the third episode of Wolfenstein 3D is fashioned after one of the original Pac-Man levels.
  • It was rumored that Toru Iwatani had quit Namco because he only received a small amount of money after creating the game. In reality, he was promoted and as of 2004 is still a Namco employee.
  • The Ms. Pac-Man cartridge for the Atari 2600 was vastly superior to the original Pac-Man. Over the years, Atari hobbyists have somewhat reversed engineered the games graphics and colors to make the game feel like how the original Pac-Man should have been. While this is technically a copyright violation (see MAME), the reverse-engineered ROM has been a popular item among collectors of original 2600 games.
  • In the popular video game oriented web cartoon Penny Arcade, Gabe is almost always seen wearing a yellow shirt with a black outline of Pac-Man. Other strips reveal that he his room is decorated with Pac-Man sheets and matching curtains and that he wears a tatoo of pac-man eating pellets around his arm.
  • A Pac-Man or Ms.Pac-Man can still be found in many arcades as of 2004, especially Namco-owned arcades.

Online playable games

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