Pac-Man (MB Hall of Fame Inductee)

Hall of Fame Inductee
Pac-Man
Original Release: 1980
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco/Midway

It would be an understatement to say that Pac-Man is a first-ballot hall of famer. Pac-Man, prior to the video game crash of 1983, was the pinnacle of video games. Pac-Man had become the mascot of the arcades. Even thirty years after its release, the original Pac-Man is incredibly popular and remakes and spin-offs are still profitable ventures for Namco.

Pac-Man changed the video game landscape by offering gameplay that had differed from previous concepts. Prior to Pac-Man games were either derived from previous games (usually competitors imitating and ripping off each other) or new concepts without any imagination. Pac-Man was a game that broke from conventions and offered new gameplay elements and ideas.

Playing Pac-Man is pretty simple. The player is a giant yellow dot and needs to eat all the small white dots in the maze. There are four different colour ghosts chasing after Pac-Man, although if Pac-Man eats one of large power pellets in the maze, the ghosts become vulnerable and Pac-Man can eat them too for a short period of time. Eating all four before the effects of the power pellet wear off results in a large reward in points. Also, fruits randomly appear below the ghosts’ den for Pac-Man to snack on to gain bonus points. Once all the dots have been consumed by Pac-Man in the level, the board resets and Pac-Man has to repeat the task all over again. As the player progresses through the levels, the enemies become more aggressive and get better at trapping Pac-Man in a corner. The more points a player scores, the more extra lives are earned and a slight chance at glory for earning one’s initials on the high score board if one is good enough.

Development started in 1978, the same year the world was swept up in a craze over Space Invaders. As popular as Space Invaders was, it wasn’t exactly unique. Even though it was heavily disguised, many of its elements came from Breakout, which was born out of Pong. Pac-Man broke from the mold. The team at Namco wanted to create something different and they did. They had the advantage of superior hardware that allowed for cleaner graphics and better sound without having to further modify current hardware unlike other trendsetting games that had to enhance motherboards to improve the games. Even certain roadblocks that weren’t able to be surpassed by the then-superior computer horsepower were corrected by some creative techniques. Although the computer wasn’t powerful enough to create a smart enough enemy AI that would allow for the ghosts to decide on the fly how they would go after Pac-Man, enough programming allowed for the enemies to take on different roles and have different attitudes towards going after Pac-Man. Most players didn’t notice that the ghosts were predictable to a certain degree (although a few professional players were able to see these exploits and use them to their advantage to gain high scores). This also helped not only Pac-Man have his own personality but gave the enemy ghosts a personality of their own; something unseen in video games at the time.

Even though it’s a Japanese game, the game had trouble finding an audience in its homeland. Most of the established games had become entrenched in the arcades and playing a game like Space Invaders had become a pastime. Anything new was met with hesitation. American audiences were much more receptive and Pac-Man became an instant classic. Pac-Man took American arcades by storm and had become the number one game in the U.S. fairly quickly. Not only did people throw away quarters in a frenzy to eat some pellets but Pac-Man also transcended the video-game world with toys and breakfast cereals being pushed on an unsuspected youth in what was one of the first examples of video games becoming a viable brand for cross-platform consumption.

Pac-Man sold like crazy. It was released on pretty much on every home console and computer during the 80s. Although many of them were poor ports in comparison to the arcade version, they sold extremely well. The Atari 2600 version sold over seven million copies which resulted in more than over 70% of Atari 2600 owners picking up the game, which was unprecedented then and is still unbelievable today. Pac-Man still performe incredibly well in the arcades despite it being widely available to the home market and the machines are still mainstays in reputable arcade houses thirty years later.

Spin-offs also kept the brand fresh into the 21^st century. Ms. Pac-Man became a major hit as well and is a title that may or may not be entered in this site’s Hall of Fame in the future. While some credit the game for breaking the gender-barrier for the main character, many prefer Ms. Pac-Man because it offer different mazes instead of the one and also had better enemy AI. Throughout the years there were other modifications to the formula or Pac-Man was spun off to make new games that took Pac-Man away from labyrinths and into other formulas such as puzzle games.

However, Pac-Man has seen a renaissance of sorts in the 21^th century by returning to the standard formula. Although there was a well-received arcade-only version of Mario Kart with Pac-Man as a playable character, it was games that played more like the original game that saw it return to the mainstream consciousness. Pac-Man Vs., a game which was intended to show off the connectivity between Nintendo’s Gamecube and Game Boy Advance machines was praised as being a top-notch title for the console. It allowed four players to play with one person controlling Pac-Man while the other three players control the ghosts using the GBA. Pac-Man Championship Edition become a major hit on Xbox Live for the Microsoft Xbox 360. It offered the very similar gameplay as the 1980 version but with updated graphics, sounds, and offered a more robust experience.

Pac-Man is still considered one of the biggest icons in video games today and will be for some time to come. Unlike many of the other popular games of its era, Pac-Man has been able to recreate itself and stay strong throughout the years by offering minor tweaks to what was in 1980 a winning formula. Considering that for a while the NES version of Pac-Man was the only third-party title that was on the top-selling Virtual Console lists for months. This, despite there being a library of several hundred titles, has ensured that Pac-Man will be loved by future generations to come.