Oh. Oh no. Oh dear god, no.
In the early 1980s, Pac-Man was big. Really big. It was so big, it made rock stars out of these dorks:
Naturally, the desire to get a home version of the game developed was huge. Atari already had the rights to Namco’s arcade games, and tasked programmer Tod Frye with making the game. Atari gave Frye minimal time (a few short months) and would not listen to his pleas for the game to contain extra memory (note that the Pac-Man arcade board was dozens of times more powerful than an Atari 2600). Ultimately, Frye did as much as he could given the time and technical constraints.
The hype for a home version of Pac-Man was understandably immense, but Atari’s response to that is almost unbelievable – they produced 12 million copies of the game at a time when they’d sold about 10 million consoles. That’s not a typo – for reasons known only to God and a handful of incredibly stupid Atari executives, at one time there were more Pac-Man cartridges than Atari 2600s. This may be the most baffling fact in the history of video games.
In addition to all that, the game isn’t good. Perhaps the biggest problem, honestly, is that it looks like this:
This is the only self-made screenshot I’ll even use for this post, because it just looks like that, all the time. At a first glance, it does kinda look like Pac-Man, I suppose. Pac-Man is sorta there. There are ghosts that look like ghosts, I guess. There’s a whole lot more that’s wrong, however – in particular, the maze is all wrong. There are fewer pellets (known as “wafers” in the Atari version due to the shape necessitated by the hardware), and the maze itself is extremely different. Pac-Man can only “look” left and right, even when moving up or down. The colors are also gaudy and terrible, and for a truly absurd reason – Atari had a policy at the time that forbade black backgrounds on games not set in space. You’d think that they’d make an exception for a cultural icon like Pac-Man, but you’d be wrong. Never underestimate Atari’s ability to make bad decisions.
While the visuals are bad, the game’s controls are also bad. The crisp, fast-paced movements you’d expect from the original Pac-Man just don’t translate on the Atari 2600 and its sub-par joysticks. It can be difficult to make key turns at the right time, and in a game where that’s basically all you do, it quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. The experience is clunky and frustrating – as with the visuals, while it certainly resembles a game of Pac-Man, it’s just so, so wrong. It’s Pac-Man, only without the fun.
Atari made at least some effort to warn customers that the home version would be different in catalogs:
Differs slightly from the original! I wish it merely differed slightly from the original. It’s a damn disaster.
Within 18 months, the over-production of Pac-Man and others led to the near collapse of the game industry. Tod Frye, meanwhile, became what may have been the first video game programmer to become a millionaire from the royalties he earned on every god awful Pac-Man cartridge sold. He went on to work for 3DO, where he helped with the Army Men series, and apparently worked for an energy company that makes solar panels.
Atari, meanwhile, did not make out so well. They went under in 1984 and sold off their various divisions, the history of which is too long to list here. The brand has come and gone of the last several decades in various forms, and it is currently owned by a French company that is supposedly developing a new console. I can’t wait to see how it fails. Atari released better-received ports of Pac-Man on their later platforms, but I’d be a fool to not mention that one of them used this art:
My goodness. Okay, I’ve genuinely had enough of this game – let us never speak of it again. Next week, I’m swinging into a semi-modern classic, which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Atari Pac-Man. For that, I’m grateful.