Pac-Man's
career in short:
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway,
1980. Licensed from the company Namco Pac-Man is the most played of all the
electronic games on the earth. It is converted to
over 1000 different hardware platforms all  over
the world. One of them, Atari
made a port
to their 2600 cartridge game system [see left] whitch became
very popular. Soon every game console made had it's own
clone of the game. Bringing the game into family homes made
the popularity soar even higher. By now Pac-Man was well known
by everyone, young as old worldwide. This was the start of a whole new industry of Pac-Man related
things. The Pac-Mania had begun;
Pac-Man appeared at the frontcover of Time Magazine
and the comic Mad [see left] as well as spawning a
TV-based, Saturday-morning cartoon and a hit
song.
Even a corn-flakes firm used the never-ending gobbler Pac-Man
as a mascot to market their product. [see right]
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Game
backgrounder:
[pacman] Designed by
Toru Iwantani. Programmed by Hideyuki Mokajima
and crew Pacman was conceived at
lunchtime...literally. The designer was very
hungry, and ordered a whole pizza for himself. He
took one slice, and Pacman was born. The name
Pacman is derived from the Japanese slang word
"paku-paku", which means "to
eat". The game was called
"Puckman" in Japan, but due to
American's predilection with changing words to
vulgarities by scratching part of the word off
(Puck to..well, you know), it was changed to
Pacman. To give the game some tension, some
clever AI was programmed into the game. The
ghosts would group up, attack the player, then
disperse. Each ghost had its own AI. Blinky
chases Pacman, Pinky is positioned a few dots in
front of Pacman's mouth. The others move
randomly. The game took 1 1/2 years to complete,
and had five people on its team. Pacman is the
greatest selling arcade game of all time, and is
arguably the most well-known video character. It
had its own cartoon, lunch box, board game, and
hundreds of other products. Pacman was also the
first game to have a "character", and
changed the face of video games forever. Pacman
was the first video game to be as equally popular
to women as it was with men. (Thanks to Jeff
Mercer for the Iwatani interview transcript, from
which most of this trivia was taken.) |
The
official Pac-Man description.
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Entertainment
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Wanna play Pac-Man right
away ?
Then try this java-game
Remember to have the macromedia plug-in installed !
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Haven't heard the Pac-Man fever song
yet ?
Download/play this RA-file now : Pac-Man fever
(make sure you've got the Realplayer plug-in)
NB! This song and lyrics are the properties of
Buckner/Garcia. |
Game Collage
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The intermediate cartoons :
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1. animation
 
The
chase...
...and
the BIG revenge |
2. animation
 
An obstacle
!
...and
a patched ghost |
3. animation
 
Still hunting,
before... ...crawling
back, beaten |
| Ghost personality
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| This is the original
NAMCO(tm) ghost characters. Notice the
japanese names and their relative
nicknames. Both the color and the
graphics differs from the US ones.These
four cartoon-like figures all had their
own independent personality. |
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| Bally/Midway had their
own names based on a translation of the
japanese original. 'Character'
indicates the behaviour and personality
of each of the ghosts, whereas the 'nickname'
says something about the ghosts outlook.
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| Pac-Man's personality
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Pac Man's character is difficult
to explain even to the Japanese -- he is an
innocent character. He hasn't been educated to
discern between good and evil. He acts more like
a small child than a grown-up person. Think
of him as a child learning in the course of his
daily activities. If some one tells him guns are
evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat
guns. But he would most probably eat any gun,
even the pistols of policemen who need them.
-- Toru Iwatani,
author of Pac-Man
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| The fruit collection |
| Ghosts eyes |
| Cage facilities |
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Line of aim |
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Tunnel Escape |
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The cage is the ghosts home. Pac-Man have no access here !
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The ghosts are always looking in their moving directions. |
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| Each stage has it's own fruit. The picture above shows the
fruit-bar located under the maze itself, with the left-most fruit indicating current stage.. |
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Whenever you eat a ghost it's eyes (their soul?)
will return to the cage where the ghost will respawn(incarnation?), and begin hunting you again. |
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When things gets a little hot on your tail the tunnel let's you regain the lead. |
This is it. The fun is gone. You've used up all your Pac-Men. Did'nt get the highscore ?
There's only one thing to do; feed the slot with more coins
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Pac-Man with legs !
Modify and make your own
Getting bored ? Not satisfied with
the original graphics in Pac-man ?
Visit
http://odyssy.net/users/snakepit/index.html
Here is an example :
This is called 'Electric Cowboy'
Pac-Man for music
Using Winamp ?
Here's a nice skin for You to use :
Pac-Amp
!
So, you're playing MP.3-files ?
Then you'll probably be excited to hear Techno-Pac in MPEG-1 layer 3 format :
Techno-Pac
Mastering the game
All things must come to an end !
This is what it looks like beating the game :
Everyone can do this. You only got to stay
alive to level 256 !
Official Midway commercial
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