Did Pac-Man Get a Fair Shake?

[Ransom]

I remember when my mom picked me up from school one day (must have been 7th grade) and she surprised me with my very own copy of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600! It'd just been released. I was so happy!

 

Then we got home, and I put it in, and....I liked it! The sounds were a bit of a surprise, but overall it was a pretty good game.

 

Then I read in Electronic Games and other magazines about how terrible of a game it was, how the flickering ghosts were inexcusable, etc.

 

And I nodded along with some of that, but I continued to play and enjoy the game.

 

For those of you who got your first look at 2600 Pac-Man back then, what was your reaction? Particularly, if you didn't read any reviews first.

[+Psionic]

This has been discussed many times...

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=95828

[+SpiceWare]

Consider what DEBRO's Pacman 4K looks like, yes, it was given a fair shake.

 

Screenshots and Final Rom

Edited April 16, 2008 by SpiceWare

[Kripto]

That game was an abominable turd and should be sent back to Hell.

[Foxsolo2000]

This has been discussed many times...

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=95828

 

Perhaps so but he is sharing with us his memories and his thoughts. No one should be afraid to share those precious memories

[BassGuitari]

Pac-Man on the VCS is nothing like it could/should have been.

 

BUT, I do play it regularly when my 2600 is set up and I do enjoy it.

[Foxsolo2000]

Pac-Man on the VCS is nothing like it could/should have been.

 

BUT, I do play it regularly when my 2600 is set up and I do enjoy it.

 

I would be the first to agree with you but can any of us actually recall how excited we were to actually see it in action for the first time. I remember when my friend Jerry got it for his birthday, his dad paid £39.99 for the thing which was the upper end of the scale back in 1981 and a hell of a lot of money and thinking how jealous I was of him for having it. It is only years later that you look back on it and think man that game could have been so much better

[NickelPlate]

I remember this specifically. I was in 6th grade and a friend invited me over to play it after school. I remember thinking how different it looked from the arcade, also I didn't understand why the characters were flickering. I didn't really expect it to be a faithful arcade repro, but I at least expected the maze to be similiar, if not the same and it was totally different. My hopes of being able to practice for the arcade version were dashed.

 

In spite of that, I enjoyed playing it at least for awhile. At the time, playing Pac-Man in your home as many times as you wanted without quarters was almost magical, even if it was different. But when I got my 5200 and Pac-Man cart not long after that I never looked back. Still play it today.

 

NP

Edited April 16, 2008 by NickelPlate

[Prodos8]

I recall forcing myself to play it as my dad went through some trouble to get a copy and it was more expensive than other games. Didn't want to appear ungrateful for it. The thing I remember irking me the most was that pac-man couldn't turn up or down. The flicker, sound effects & screwed up maze didn't do much for me either.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

If we had never known Pacman from the arcades and the 2600 release was an original idea, it would stand up pretty well. The pace is decent, the challenge is there, it does what it does on a reasonable level. BUT given the original source material, especially since it was a humungous title, I think we all felt crapped on by Atari when they rushed it out as a mere 2k game. I was on the receiving end of that and I confess, much as I loved Atari at the time, I did feel pretty ticked off at them. Obviously it's not going to be a replica of the arcade experience but given how close Centipede, Missile Command, and Space Invaders were, we all had an idea of roughly how close they should have been able to get it. When we actually turned on Pacman, I think we all felt a bit ripped off. I know I did.

And yeah the new homebrews of Pacman show what the hardware is capable of now and seriously rock! My personal preference is for Nukey Shay's Hack 'Em. Sweetness incarnate.

[Recycled]

I've posted my opinion on this game ad nauseum.....but maybe I didn't give the game it's "fair shake"......I should of just opened the box and "shook" it into the garbage without even wasting my time with it.

 

[kirin jensen]

The answer is yes and no.

 

If your main exposure to video games was your atari (and for kids whose parents thought video arcades were wretched hives of scum and villainy, it often was), then no, it didn't get a fair shake. That's doubly true if none of your friends owned an O2 and K.C.Munchkin.

 

But if you loved the arcade version of Pac-Man and/or were familiar with K.C. Munchkin, then it got more of a fair shake than it deserved.

 

It would have been considered a great translation in the era of Space Invaders and Missile Command, but the time of its release, expectations had changed.

[tremoloman2006]

Pac-Man (Atari's release) = POS

Pac-Man (4K) = What we deserved

 

After I got Pac-Man I discovered Lock N' Chase, Jawbreaker, and Alien which then took over as my favorites when I needed a Pac-Man fix.

[Ransom]

After I got Pac-Man I discovered Lock N' Chase, Jawbreaker, and Alien which then took over as my favorites when I needed a Pac-Man fix.

 

All good games, but let's not forget Lady Bug! Playing that on the ColecoVision back then was a revelation to me (to this day, I haven't played it on an arcade machine). To me, Galaga:Space Invaders::Lady Bug:Pac-Man.

[iratanam]

When I got my copy of Pac-Man back in the day, I thought it looked strange, but I remember how much I enjoyed it. I don't think I really cared how it looked or sounded. At the time it was the closest thing to Pac-Man we had, it sure beat the LCD versions (Maybe with the exception of TomyPac, I loved that hand held LCD version, more like a table top really.)

 

Then when Ms. Pac-Man came out for the 2600 I was really knocked over by it, granted that I never owned my own copy of it back then, my parents said we couldn't afford it, so I visited friends all the time that had copies

[godzillajoe]

I'd like to see DD's version maybe expanded to 8K or whatever and released.

 

Throw the intermissions in there and clean up some of the game play (feels too slow) and it would be an awesome version

 

Still impressive as hell

 

Now about the original, we played it, because for all its faults, it was Pac-Man at home

 

Though once Ms. Pac-Man came out, it was forgotten

[ComputerSpaceFan]

I'd like to see DD's version maybe expanded to 8K or whatever and released.

 

Throw the intermissions in there and clean up some of the game play (feels too slow) and it would be an awesome version

 

Still impressive as hell

 

And if I could add another request, see if the flicker can be reduced a bit, it's a little harsh on the eyes.

[accousticguitar]

Flicker has never been a problem for me, so the ghosts in Pac Man didn't bother me. What did bother me was the lousy maze, the vertical tunnel, the irritating sound effects, and the Pac Man that wouldn't face up or down. The game was so bad I never bought another new 2600 cartridge (darn, missed ET ). Every once in a while I pop it in to see if it was really that bad, and find that my opinion has not changed. It was an overpriced underachiever.

[Nukey Shay]

The funny thing is that the game was easily tweaked to eliminate the major gripes against it -without- significant alterations to the program. A correct color scheme and less noticable flicker is done just by changing the color table...the monsters (or "ghosts") already have seperate colors. The ability to face up and down is done by adding a few bytes of code to the program. No great savings were had by using the hardware collisions, so alter this to use relative position collision detection instead. Seperate dot colors are done by just storing the color white to the lines (and eliminating all of the OR's that mix maze data into them). The other significant changes (sounds, maze layout, and "vitamin" sprite) are less important than the overall look and feel of the game.

 

Atari had hyped the game for a year before it was made...and meanwhile, some very good clones had already appeared on the console.

 

So yeah, the release version did deserve the negative press it got. There's no excuse for problems that are easily fixed...especially when said fixes can still fit within the confines of 4k.

[BassGuitari]

Pac-Man on the VCS is nothing like it could/should have been.

 

BUT, I do play it regularly when my 2600 is set up and I do enjoy it.

 

I would be the first to agree with you but can any of us actually recall how excited we were to actually see it in action for the first time. I remember when my friend Jerry got it for his birthday, his dad paid £39.99 for the thing which was the upper end of the scale back in 1981 and a hell of a lot of money and thinking how jealous I was of him for having it. It is only years later that you look back on it and think man that game could have been so much better

 

I can.

 

I didn't get an Atari until 1999 (I was born in '85). I didn't have any games, so a friend from my Boy Scout troop came over once with some of his dad's old games, one of them being Pac-Man. I had read about how bad it was, how it looked nothing like the arcade, how bad the sounds were, how it was the worst game of all time, etc etc ad infinitum. Still, I was undeterred. I kind of figured, "well, no shit it's gonna be worse than the arcade...it's a friggin' Atari." (I wouldn't learn until later how much more the 2600 was capable of.) That, and I was just excited to finally be able to play the mythical Atari 2600. After Combat, Pac-Man was the second game I ever played on one, and I loved it. I could certainly understand some of the complaints that I had read about it, but we nevertheless played Pac-Man for probably a solid hour after trying out the other games he brought over.

[Foxsolo2000]

The funny thing is that the game was easily tweaked to eliminate the major gripes against it -without- significant alterations to the program. A correct color scheme and less noticable flicker is done just by changing the color table...the monsters (or "ghosts") already have seperate colors. The ability to face up and down is done by adding a few bytes of code to the program. No great savings were had by using the hardware collisions, so alter this to use relative position collision detection instead. Seperate dot colors are done by just storing the color white to the lines (and eliminating all of the OR's that mix maze data into them). The other significant changes (sounds, maze layout, and "vitamin" sprite) are less important than the overall look and feel of the game.

 

Atari had hyped the game for a year before it was made...and meanwhile, some very good clones had already appeared on the console.

 

So yeah, the release version did deserve the negative press it got. There's no excuse for problems that are easily fixed...especially when said fixes can still fit within the confines of 4k.

 

Yes but are you looking at it through hindsight or as the programnmer would have seen it back in 81? I encouraged this discussion for many of talk of Pac Man as we see it now and not how we truly saw it back then. I remember when my local electrical store called Greens had it on display in Gainsborough back in the day and thinking that the guy playing it was such a lucky f*****. Now I play it and think as you do that with a little tweaking it could have been fricking fantastic

[Nukey Shay]

The incorrect color aspect is a non-issue...the code is already there to display correct colors. Hardware vs. software collision-detection is equally moot, many games ignored hardware collisions prior to Pac-Man. Having the Pac sprite face the correct way is the most memory-consuming task (because 3 additional bitmaps would need to be added)...but there are so many JMP's in the program that can be changed to unconditional branches (or eliminated completely) that you pick up enough romspace to fit them in. Ditto for mixing maze gfx with the dots...you save more than you end up using to color the dot lines white.

 

Yup...no "unheard-of" code techniques or tricks used.

[HammR25]

As I kid I never really cared that it wasn't very close to the arcade because it was the friggin 2600 not the arcade. I never knew it was loathed by so many until I came to this site. The same goes for E.T.

 

Now I just don't care about it because I can play much better versions at home.

[Mirage]

"Real" ghosts are kinda flickery and transparent, so it was actually better than the arcade version!

 

I remember playing it with my dad for hours and hours, so it was a ton of fun. I don't think I was conscious at the time that the Atari could do better, so it never really occurred to me that it was "bad". Come to think of it, Pac-Man and Video Pinball were the only two games my dad would ever play. He hated video games and computers otherwise.

[Vic George 2K3]

Given that I was playing my Atari 2600 games on a black-and-white TV set, I used to have fun altering the brightness and contrast knobs in order to make the game more challenging by making the maze and the dots rather invisible, so the challenge for completing the screen was trying to get all the dots.