Pac-Man
Pac-Man was first introduced in the autumn of 1979, and it was an instant hit. It 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 since part of the word Puck could be scratched off to turn it into an English curse word.
Screenshot of the Pac-Man arcade game
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2 Implementation 3 A disastrous port 4 Legacy 5 Historical events 6 Trivia 7 External links |
Pac-Man is a maze game where the character Pac-Man, a yellow circle with a mouth, has to navigate a maze eating dots and prizes. A level, or board, is finished when all dots are eaten. Four monsters, named Shadow (Blinky), Speedy (Pinky), Bashful (Inky), and Pokey (Clyde), wander the maze attempting to eat Pac-Man; they are red, pink, aqua and orange in color, respectively. (In the original Puck-Man, these monsters were named Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta). 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), who 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 (specifically, between Boards 2 and 3, 5 and 6, 9 and 10, and then following every four completed boards thereafter) show humorous animated cut-scenes featuring Pac-Man and the monsters.
Additionally, points can be earned by having Pac-Man run over a symbol 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.
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.
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 just basically 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.
Ironically, 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.
The enemies in the Atari Pac-Man cartridge were called "ghosts" in the manual. This was because technical limitations meant that only one ghost could be drawn on the screen at a time, so in order for there to be four ghosts, the system had to jump back and forth between them very quickly, so that each ghost was only actually drawn one-fourth of the time. This resulted in a lot of flickering for each individual ghost; that, plus all four ghosts appeared to be the same pale color due to the flicker, was what inspired the name change.
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; 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. Lorenzo Music 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.
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 3,333,560 points.
Description
Implementation
A disastrous port
Legacy
Historical events
Trivia
External links