Pac-Man Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Pac-Man was first introduced in Japan in the autumn of 1980 where it went by the name Puck Man. It quickly became an instant hit. It was soon picked up for manufacture in the U.S by Bally division Midway Manufacturing, 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 change from Puck-man to Pac-Man was said to be partially motivated out of a desire to avoid the obvious verbal vandalism that Americans could inflict upon the game cabinets.

Description

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.

The monsters have names and nicknames which were, in the English language version, 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). Puck-Man also had a DIP switch for alternate ghost names: Urchin (Macky), Romp (Micky), Stylist (Mucky), and Crybaby (Mocky). The monsters are introduced by name during the demo mode of the game.

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 256thth 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. Standard upright, mini-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

port of Pac-Man was a substandard disaster.]]

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 overall 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 many instead purchased similar offerings from competing video game publishers. The sales figures would normally have been respectable - 70% of Atari's 10 million-strong user base bought the game. However, Atari produced 12 million cartridges, which led to a large loss for the company.

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 prototype suffered from a flashing screen because of the limitations of the 2600. There could only be one ghost at a time onscreen, constantly hiding one ghost and making another appear. It looked like the screen was flickering, and is why the enemies in the game have been referred to as ghosts. The game had several other flaws.

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 two 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 called Pac-Man Vs. for the Nintendo GameCube allowed four players to play simultaneously. One player used the Game Boy Advance to view the entire Pac-Man maze and control Pac-Man, while three other players used 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

• 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.
• In Brazil, the game was unofficially named by the children as Come-Come (lit. he eats-he eats, in Portuguese). Also an onomatopoeic, from the sound the character does when walking/eating.
• 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 his room is decorated with Pac-Man sheets and matching curtains and that he wears a tattoo 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.

See also

• List of arcade games
• Polyplay, Arcade machine from the Former Eastern Bloc, incorporating their answer to Pac-Man.
• Pacman frog

• Pac Man entry on the Killer List of Videogames
• Interview with Pac-man designer, Toru Iwatani, from Retrogamer
• Pac Man World Record article from TwinGalaxies.com
• Pac-Manhattan website, a real-world enactment of a Pac-Man game
• The meaning of Pacman, an original and unabridged postmodern and ironic essay by Thomas Eugene Taylor-Bradford
• The Virtual Pac-Man Museum
• Pac-Man Fever, the story and lyrics
• World's only dedicated Puckman site, the original Japanese title which is still in use
• Pac-Man Info, contains an enormous amount of technical data on the Pac-Man systems.
• Computer Statistics site with details on the origin of the Pac-Man name and concept

• Pac-man Java game from Benny Chow, similar to the arcade version (with aspects of Ms. Pac Man)
• Pac-Man online from David Neave (requires Macromedia Flash)
• Atari 2600 like version with online highscores (requires Macromedia Shockwave)
• Pacman in Javascript from Jürgen Müller-Lütken (and a collection of over 100 other Pacman games on the World Wide Web)

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