Chomp and Chase

The classic arcade scene was dominated by single screen adventures. Mario (or Jumpman, as he was known back then) scaling platforms to reach his kidnapped love, Pauline, taken from him by the big gorilla, Donkey Kong. A space fighter taking on the constantly dropping and shooting evil hordes of Galaxian. Missiles falling from the sky with a lone base operator working to blow them up in Missile Command. These games packed a lot of action into a single screen of information, and these titles (and many, many others) grabbed so many quarters from arcade players for many, many years.

Arguably one of the most famous, and most successful, of these single screen titles was Nacmo’s opus, Pac-Man (aka Puck Man in originating country, Japan). This game is incredible in its simplicity, but that belies just how much work had to go into the development of the game. The effort to keep it cute and friendly so it would appeal to all ages. The work made to make it just interesting enough to grab eyes, but not so focused towards any one kind of demographic such that it chased other players away. The detail is evident in the design, and it feels just so natural when you stand at the machine (or put a controller in your hands) and start moving.

Although I’m sure everyone is aware of the basics of Pac-Man, we’ll still cover it here. Namco’s game (released in North America by Midway) is the kind of simple at first glance game that really doesn’t need a lot of basic instruction. You have your little yellow round guy, Pac-Man, who moves around the maze, always moving and never stopping (unless you run him up against a wall), collecting dots along the paths of a maze. From the second the game starts (with its jaunty little jingle that draws you in) you immediately get what you should do: collect the dots because they disappear when you move over them.

Of course, just collecting the dots isn’t all there is to the game. You also have to worry about the ghosts. These spirits protect the maze, moving around it and chasing Pac-Man to prevent him from getting the dots. If you touch one of the ghosts, you die. Lose all your lives and it’s game over. The game makes this clear from the outset, since if you let a ghost run you down, you instantly get what happens when Pac-Man disappears in a puff of pixels. Of course, if you run over one of the bigger pellets in the game (of which there are four per maze) then the ghosts turn blue and run away from you. Then you can either chase them for points, or let them run while you collect more pellets.

This is a strong skill the game presents right from the beginning: the game is so simple that you can learn all you need to know just for three minutes of playing it, which just so happens to be exactly how long the average arcade game should last on a single quarter. Simplicity at its finest. Nothing about the game is complex in its presentation. It doesn’t have to have a long screen detailing what you have to do or where you have to go. You have pellets worth points, you have a maze, and you have a guy that wants to eat everything in his path. What more do you need to know?

I’d actually credit the developers on Pac-Man for finding just the right balance to keep players interesting and playing the game. It starts off slow in the first round, with Pac-Man able to keep away from the ghosts fairly easily, but even in the second maze the ghosts get more speed, are more able to corner you, and are bigger threats to your health. You just have to be a casual fan to get through one maze of the game (which should take, look at that, about three minutes) but the following mazes are much harder, even if the layout is exactly the same. Only a skilled player is going to be able to get through a few more mazes before they lose all their Pacs. Only a pro is going to make it all the way through all the rounds to the inevitable kill screen of the game. It ramps up, fast, by design.

Upon release the game was an instant hit, putting Pac-Man in the upper echelons of video game characters. He’s right up there with Mario and Sonic, and has in fact featured in games with those characters (not the least of which was the Smash Bros. series). One game made him a household name, and Pac-Man machines quickly started appearing everywhere, becoming fixtures of arcades throughout the 1980s and 1990s. If you went anywhere that had arcade games (not, just arcades but also mini-golf parks, pizza parlors, and more) then you were bound to find a Pac-Man machine there.

The game was foundational for the 1980s arcade scene which meant, of course, that everyone else needed to have their own maz-and-chase games. While Pac-Man wasn’t the first game in the maze-and-chase format (you could point at 1979’s Heiankyo Alien as a direct predecessor, and other games like 1959’s Mouse in the Maze and 1973’s Gotcha for games at least related by genre) it was the one truly popularized it. Maze-and-chase games came fast and furious after that, with the likes of Rally X, Chomper, Gobbler, Jawbreaker, and more quickly following. While a few of these went on to be famous in their own right it’s arguable if any truly matched the power of the original Pac-Man.

Even Namco struggled to find their own successful follow-up to Pac-Man, with the likes of Pac-Tac, Super Pac-Man, and Pac-Mania failing to recapture the magic of the original. Of all the associated Pac titles to come along, only one proved to be even more popular than the first game: 1981’s Ms. Pac-Man. This female-starring title, though, wasn’t actually made by Namco. It was developed by General Computer under the name Crazy Otto as an upgrade kit for Pac-Man machines, but when they brought the game to distributor Midway, they decided to turn it into a proper sequel, blessing the world with Pac-Man’s one, true love (no matter what Namco might say now). We will, of course, cover that game in a bit as its own entry.

Meanwhile, Pac-Man proved to be successful not only in arcades but at home. So many home editions of the game were released over the years, some better than others. Atari expected Pac-Man to be a huge seller on their console, the 2600, which was the biggest home console in the U.S. at the time, but the version they released was so terrible, both in design and appearance, that the game failed to meet their (already inflated) expectations, and it actually bombed there. Other consoles, like the ColecoVision and Intellivision had better luck, and the game continues to come out (sometimes in multiple versions) on later consoles (such as two different versions on the NES, one developed by Tengen, which, as with all their ports, proved to be the superior version).

With one game Pac-Man’s legacy was made, and he became one of the most successful video game characters of all time. Of course, his woman was just around the corner, and she’d prove to be the real star of this whole show, at least in 1981…