original Pacman for 2600, why the wrong colors?

[ComputerSpaceFan]

I tried looking for info on this and came up empty.

I realize the version of Pacman we got on the 2600 was a series of compromises and I know it has its loyal fan base.

 

What I can't figure out is why did Tod Fry not at least try to match the color scheme? Why is the background light blue instead of black? Why is the maze beige instead of blue?

Was there any efficiency or coding reason behind this? Otherwise it really adds to the complaints people have about the 2600 version seemingly with no good explanation why it's different from the arcade version.

[+eebuckeye]

I heard blue instead of black because Atari allowed black only for their space games and were also concerned about burn-in.  Not sure this is correct but seems plausible. ?

[edladdin]

Todd Frye has said he was told not to use black so it would not look like a space game, but this was hardly an iron clad rule at Atari. There were tons of other non-space Atari games before, concurrent, and after Pac-Man that had black backgrounds.  Just off the top of my head:

 

Breakout

Night Driver

Warlords

Berzerk

Mario Brothers

Centipede 

Millipede

 

Now that I think of it, I have never heard any other programmers mention this rule.

[+Andrew Davie]

Maybe Todd just thought "why stop here?" and decided to make it as ugly as he possibly could.

 

[high voltage]

Never went to arcades, for me, a great (original) game 

[Rastignac]

I read that he did that to reduce the blink-fatigue. Because the game blinks so much, going 0%-100%-0%-100% was very tiring for the eyes. His choice was less headache prone. Hacking the rom with arcade colors is less ugly but less comfortable.

[keithbk]

"They didn't call him 'Todd Fried' for nothing!" - Anonymous

[RGC]

My 7 year old self didn't care. At the time I thought it was fine

[BladeJunker]

Company policy sounds plausible to me, lots of dumb things like that happen to the day. Really it comes down to why change arcade colors ever in a port unless you have to? Take something like the C64 with it's fixed colors where that's all you get, then you got platforms like 2600 and Sega Genesis which have decent system palettes but the people using them seem to have vision problems in many cases. ?

 

At least people are making lots of color hacks these days and we're rich with Pac Man titles now.  2600 P-M was definitely from a different universe but I can't say I didn't play it a lot, E.T. was very easy to put down bitd lol but I've grown to appreciate even that now.

[Video]

Interestingly, mspacman also has a blue background. At least her colors are nicer though, Pac man literally looks like they went out of their was to pick sewage for colors lol.

 

I've also heard Atari wanted non space games to have different colors from black. Sounds reasonable, but as already mentioned, wasn't always followed.

 

You can get a modern hack with proper colors though (AA used to have it, don't know if they still do) or you can play in b/w mode, which gives a black bg and white walls, I think the sprites remain their own colors.