Pac-Man
is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed
for distribution in the United States by Midway, first
released in Japan on May 22, 1980. Immensely popular
from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man
is universally considered as one of the classics of
the medium, virtually synonymous with video games,
and an icon of the 1980s popular culture. Upon its
release, the game—and, subsequently, Pac-Man
derivatives—became a social phenomenon[6] that
sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among
other things, an animated television series and a
top-ten hit single.
When
Pac-Man was released, the most popular arcade video
games were space shooters, in particular Space Invaders
and Asteroids. The most visible minority were sports
games that were mostly derivative of Pong. Pac-Man
succeeded by creating a new genre and appealing to
both genders. Pac-Man is often credited with being
a landmark in video game history, and is among the
most famous arcade games of all time. The character
also appears in more than 30 officially licensed game
spin-offs, as well as in numerous unauthorized clones
and bootlegs. According to the Davie-Brown Index,
Pac-Man has the highest brand awareness of any video
game character among American consumers, recognized
by 94 percent of them Pac-Man is one of the longest
running video game franchises from the golden age
of video arcade games, and one of only three video
games that are on display at the Smithsonian in Washington
D.C., (along with Pong and Dragon's Lair).
Gameplay
The
player controls Pac-Man through a maze, eating pac-dots.
When all dots are eaten, Pac-Man is taken to the next
stage. Four monsters (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde)
roam the maze, trying to catch Pac-Man. If a monster
touches Pac-Man, a life is lost. When all lives have
been lost, the game ends. Pac-Man is awarded a single
bonus life at 10,000 points by default—DIP switches
inside the machine can change the required points
or disable the bonus life altogether.
Near
the corners of the maze are four larger, flashing
dots known as power pellets that provide Pac-Man with
the temporary ability to eat the monsters. The monsters
turn deep blue, reverse direction, and usually move
more slowly. When a monster is eaten, its eyes remain
and return to the monster box where it is regenerated
in its normal color. Blue monsters flash white before
they become dangerous again and the amount of time
the monsters remain vulnerable varies from one board
to the next, but the time period generally becomes
shorter as the game progresses. In later stages, the
monsters do not change colors at all, but still reverse
direction when a power pellet is eaten.
In
addition to Pac-dots and power pellets, bonus items,
usually referred to as fruits (though not all items
are fruit) appear near the center of the maze. These
items score extra bonus points when eaten. The items
change and bonus values increase throughout the game.
Also, a series of intermissions play after certain
levels toward the beginning of the game, showing a
humorous set of interactions (the first being after
level 2) between Pac-Man and Blinky (the red monster).
Monsters
Pac-Man's arcade cabinet refers to the enemies as
"monsters". When the Atari 2600 home version
of the game was released with pale, flickering enemies,
the manual dubbed them "ghosts". The TV
series refers to them as "ghost monsters".
The
monsters are bound by the maze in the same way as
Pac-Man, but generally move slightly faster than the
player, although they slow down when turning corners
and slow down significantly while passing through
the wraparound tunnels on the sides of the maze (Pac-Man
passes through these tunnels unhindered). Pac-Man
slows down slightly while eating dots, potentially
allowing a chasing monster to catch him.
Blinky,
the red monster, also speeds up after a certain number
of dots are eaten (this number gets lower in higher
levels).
Split-screen
Behavior
A monster always maintains its current direction until
it reaches an intersection, at which point it can
turn left or right. Periodically, the monsters will
reverse direction and head for the corners of the
maze (commonly referred to as "scatter mode"),
before reverting to their normal behavior. In an interview,
Iwatani stated that he had designed each monster with
its own distinct personality in order to keep the
game from becoming impossibly difficult or boring
to play. The behaviors of each monster have been exactly
determined by reverse-engineering the game.
Despite
the seemingly random nature of some of the monsters,
their movements are strictly deterministic, enabling
experienced players to devise precise sequences of
movements for each level (termed "patterns")
that allow them to complete the levels without ever
being caught. A later revision of the game code altered
the monsters' behavior, but new patterns were soon
developed for that behavior as well. Players have
also learned how to exploit other flaws in the monsters'
behavior, including finding places where they can
hide indefinitely without moving, and a code bug occasionally
allows Pac-Man to pass through a non-blue monster
unharmed. Several patterns have been developed to
exploit this bug. The bug arises from the fact that
the game logic performs collision detection based
on monster / Pac-Man occupancy of grid squares, where
the grid squares are large relative to the size of
the characters. A character occupies (for collision
detection purposes) only one grid square ("tile")
at a time, despite its graphic depiction overflowing
to another tile. If a monster and Pac-Man switch tiles
with each other simultaneously (which is not a rare
phenomenon, because the tiles granularity is large),
a collision isn't detected.
Intermissions
There
are three intermissions—animations that play
between boards. The first plays after the second board;
the second plays after the fifth board; and the third
plays after boards 9, 13, and 17, and repeats for
later boards.
In
the first intermission, the red monster chases Pac-Man
off the screen, then reappears as a blue monster being
chased the other direction by a giant Pac-Man.
In
the second intermission, the red monster chases Pac-Man
across the screen until his pelt snags on a tack and
rips, exposing his foot.
In the third intermission, the red monster chases
Pac-Man across the screen, then crosses the screen
in the opposite direction, naked and pink, dragging
his pelt behind him.
Pac-Man
technically has no ending—as long as the player
keeps at least one life, he or she should be able
to continue playing indefinitely. However, because
of a bug in the routine that draws the fruit, the
right side of the 256th level becomes a scrambled
mixture of text and symbols, rendering the level impossible
to pass by legitimate means. Normally, no more than
seven fruits are displayed at any one time, but when
the internal level counter (stored in a single byte)
reaches 255, the subroutine erroneously causes this
value to "roll over" to zero before drawing
the fruit. This causes the routine to attempt to draw
256 fruits, which corrupts the bottom of the screen
and the whole right half of the maze with seemingly
random symbols.
Through
tinkering, the details of the corruption can be revealed.
Some ROMs of the game are equipped with a "rack
test" feature that can be accessed through the
game's DIP switches. This feature automatically clears
a level of all dots as soon as it begins, making it
easier to reach the 256th level very quickly, as well
as allowing players to see what would happen if the
256th level is cleared (the game loops back to the
first level, causing fruits and intermissions to display
as before, but with the monsters retaining their higher
speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the
later stages). When the rack test is performed in
an emulator, a person can more easily analyze the
corruption in this level.
Pac-Man
and the monsters can move freely throughout the right
half of the screen, barring some fractured pieces
of the maze. Despite claims that someone with enough
knowledge of the maze pattern could play through the
level, it is technically impossible to complete since
the graphical corruption eliminates most of the dots
on the right half of the maze. The memory that holds
the image holds the dots, essentially. They are counted
as they are eaten, and the resetting of them could
get the count high enough to finish the level. A few
edible dots are scattered in the corrupted area, and
these dots reset when the player loses a life (unlike
in the uncorrupted areas), but these are insufficient
to complete the level. As a result, the level has
been given a number of names, including "the
Final Level", "the Blind-Side", and
the ending. It is known more generally as a kill screen.
Perfect
play
A
perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player achieves
the maximum possible score on the first 255 levels
(by eating every possible dot, energizer, fruit, and
monster) without losing a single life then scoring
as many points as possible in the last level. As verified
by the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard on July
3, 1999, the first person to achieve the maximum possible
score (3,333,360 points) was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood,
Florida, who performed the feat in about six hours.
In
September 2009, David Race of Beavercreek, Ohio, became
the sixth person to achieve a perfect score. His time
of 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 22 seconds set a new record
for the fastest time that a perfect score had been
reached.
In
December 1982, an 8-year-old boy, Jeffrey R. Yee,
supposedly 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
has passed the Split-Screen Level. Whether or not
this event happened as described has remained in heated
debate among video-game circles since its supposed
occurrence. In September 1983, Walter Day, chief scorekeeper
at Twin Galaxies, took the US National Video Game
Team on a tour of the East Coast to visit video game
players who claimed they could get through the Split-Screen.
No video game player could demonstrate this ability.
In 1999, Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 to anyone
who could provably pass through the Split-Screen Level
before January 1, 2000; the prize went unclaimed
Development
The
game was developed primarily by a young Namco employee
named Toru Iwatani over the course of a year, beginning
in April 1979, employing a nine-man team. It was based
on the concept of eating, and the original Japanese
title was Pakkuman, inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic
slang phrase paku-paku taberu, where paku-paku describes
(the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened
and then closed in succession Although Iwatani has
repeatedly stated that the character's shape was inspired
by a pizza missing a slice, he admitted in a 1986
interview that this was a half-truth and the character
design also came from simplifying and rounding out
the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi. Iwatani's
efforts to appeal to a wider audience—beyond
the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers—eventually
led him to add elements of a maze. The result was
a game he named Puck Man.
When
first launched in Japan by Namco in 1980, the game
received a lukewarm response, as Space Invaders and
other similar games were more popular at the time.
Later
that year, the game was picked up for manufacture
in the United States by Bally division Midway, under
the altered title Pac-Man (see Localization, below).
American audiences welcomed a breakaway from conventions
set by Space Invaders, which resulted in unprecedented
popularity and revenue that rivaled its successful
predecessor, as even Iwatani was impressed with U.S.
sales. The game soon became a worldwide phenomenon
within the video game industry, resulting in numerous
sequels and merchandising tie-ins. Pac-Man's success
bred imitation, and an entire genre of maze-chase
video games soon emerged.
The
unique game design inspired game publishers to be
innovative rather than conservative, and encouraged
them to speculate on game designs that broke from
existing genres. Pac-Man introduced an element of
humor into video games that designers sought to imitate,
and appealed to a wider demographic than the teenage
boys who flocked to the action-oriented games.
Pac-Man's
success in North America took competitors and distributors
completely by surprise in 1980. Marketing executives
who saw Pac-Man at a trade show prior to release completely
overlooked the game (along with the now classic Defender),
while they looked to a racing car game called Rally-X
as the game to outdo that year. The appeal of Pac-Man
was such that the game caught on immediately with
the public; it quickly became far more popular than
anything seen in the game industry up to that point.
Pac-Man outstripped Asteroids as the best-selling
arcade game of the time, and would go on to sell over
350,000 units.
Pac-Man
went on to become an icon of video game culture during
the 1980s, and a wide variety of Pac-Man merchandise
was marketed with the character's image, from t-shirts
and toys to hand-held video game imitations and even
specially shaped pasta. The Killer List of Videogames
lists Pac-Man as the #1 video game on its "Top
10 Most Popular Video games" list. 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.
Atari
is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities
since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned
by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of
the French publisher Infogrames Entertainment SA (IESA).Atari
Interactive has in turn licensed the brand name and
assets to Atari, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATAR), a 51% majority
owned subsidiary of Infogrames Entertainment SA (IESA),
encompassing its North American operations.
The
original Atari Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell
and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in arcade games,
home video game consoles, and home computers. The
company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600,
helped define the computer entertainment industry
from the 1970s to the mid 1980s.
In
1984, the original Atari Inc. was split, and the arcade
division was turned into Atari Games Inc..Atari Games
received the rights to use the logo and brand name
with appended text "Games" on arcade games,
as well as rights to the original 1972 - 1984 arcade
hardware properties. The Atari Consumer Electronics
Division properties were in turn sold to Jack Tramiel's
Tramel Technology Ltd., which then renamed itself
to Atari Corporation. In 1996, Atari Corporation reverse
merged with disk drive manufacturer JT Storage (JTS),
becoming a division within the company.
Atari
Interactive started as a subsidiary of Hasbro Interactive,
after Hasbro Interactive acquired all Atari Corporation
related properties from JTS in 1998.IESA in turn acquired
Hasbro Interactive in 2001, and proceeded to rename
it to Infogrames Interactive. In 2003, IESA then changed
the company name entirely to Atari Interactive.
The
company that currently bears the name Atari Inc. was
founded in 1993 under the name GT Interactive. IESA
acquired a 62% controlling interest in GT Interactive
in 1999, and proceeded to rename it Infogrames, Inc.
After IESA's acquirement of Hasbro Interactive and
its related Atari properties in 2001, Infogrames,
Inc. intermittently published Atari branded titles
for Infogrames Interactive. In 2003, Infogrames Inc.
licensed the Atari name and logo from Atari Interactive
and changed its name to Atari Inc.Currently, Atari
Inc. develops, publishes and distributes games for
all major video game consoles, as well as for the
personal computer, and is currently one of the largest
third-party publishers of video games in the United
States. (Credit:
Wikipedia).
