"We know that millions of people all over the world just love the PAC-MAN arcade game. PAC-MAN has won the hearts of men, women and children everywhere. We also know that PAC-MAN has traditionally been an arcade game. Well, we at ATARI know all about arcade games. After all, we make some of the greatest arcade games In the world, and we know now to bring the same dynamite game play into your home. Our PAC-MAN has all of the excitement and challenge of the standard arcade game, and you get to play in the comfort and convenience of your own home. This is especially advantageous if you still plan to make an occasional appearance at the arcade to show off your great playing skills. (Little do they know that you've been practicing at home all along.)"
-Page 1 of the Pac-Man Atari Manual
at that point in 1982, you could probably argue that those words in the manual were the biggest lie ever told in gaming. When it comes to converting arcade games to the ol' 2600, obvious compromises need to be made in order to crunch out that game essence. Some games, like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Berzerk, etc, make the conversion relatively unscathed. But sometimes you just get some absolute nonsense like Pac-Man. While this game is in literally no means an accurate conversion of the arcade classic, it does show some interesting insight into Atari history both in a cultural and gamedev sense.
So like, the game pretty much shares gameplay similarities with the arcade version and that's kind of it. You eat dots and avoid ghosts that chase you, but compared to the arcade the ghost AI is different, scoring is different, the hitboxes are different, the maze is different, you get the idea. The maze isn't even like a bastardized facsimile of the original, it's just a bunch of circles in a grid. The hitboxes for actually eating thepellets video wafers seem to be a lot smaller and more precise than the hitbox for touching ghosts which makes things feel kind of inconsistent since you gotta be further forward towards pellets video wafers in order for them to actually count as eaten whereas the ghosts touch any pixel of you and pac man dies right then and there. At least on the control front things still feel responsive and snappy. There are only 8 different game variations here, and they just change how fast Pac-Man and the Ghosts can move to somewhat alter difficulty. I found that Game 6 is the fastest for both and even then it's still not that fast, so that's my rec if you want the most engaging Pac-Man gameplay. The slowest ghost speed is designed for younger children apparently, and at that speed the only way the ghosts will ever get you is if you actively try and get yourself killed which is awesome. Also this is probably just a me thing but using the stiff Atari joystick to try and quickly maneuver Pac-Man definitely hurts my hands after a little while. If there are any boomers on this site reading this please let me know of any proper Atari controller holding tech because I still haven't figured out how to use it in both a comfortable and consistently functioning way just yet.
If you look at this game solely through the lens of how accurate of a conversion this is, it's pretty dire. But ngl this game is pretty cool to look at retrospectively. Atari crunched the fuck out of one guy in 6 months to make something they KNEW would sell millions on brand alone (and sell it did, this is the best-selling game on the system), and so within those constraints the guy likely chose to go for preserving what he believed to be the essence of Pac-Man, rather than trying to make a straight conversion with no proper time or resources. Honestly, the essence still comes through pretty well even in this conversion, and there are probably a solid amount of the 8 million copies sold were probably satisfied casual customers just trying to get their fill of eating dots and chasing ghosts without much care towards the details. It's also just that by 1982 the Atari 2600 was already roughly 5 years old, and Pac-Man was already 2, and many other people had understood standards of what they should be expecting from a first-party conversion of an immensely popular arcade title, and this definitely wasn't up to those expectations. Gaming wasn't a fad anymore, the market of core gamermen had bloomed by this point, and if there's anything we know about those guys it's that they have quite high standards for their gamin. As a result, this game (and it's partner in crime that would release at the end of the year, E.T.) could be described as one of the first games known to the general public as a "bad game", and are frequently cited by historians and fans alike as a major cause of the great American video game crash of '83 as well as being touted as some of the worst games ever made in the later internet sphere of things.
Do I think this game really deserves that kind of reputation though? I mean, kind of? It's not nearly as ambitious as something like E.T. and is a pretty blatant result of Atari cutting corners to get as much easy profit on their grubby hands at the cost of making a quality product for their consumers, so it's not exactly like this game is great or misunderstood or anything imo. The Atari could absolutely have done a more direct conversion of Pac-Man, as both the Ms. Pac man port and plenty of 2600 homebrew can prove, so it's not like it was entirely the hardware at fault either. I just think that the end product is such a fascinating result of so many factors that it's hard not to be curious about it. It will obviously never happen, but I do wish Namco would reference this bizarro version of Pac-Man or include it in compilations as a historical curio or something. If they had a 2600 pac-man skin in a championship edition game or something I would absolutely pop the fuck off ngl. I definitely still wouldn't really recommend it to anyone outside of the curious gaming historians out there in this day and age, but an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel irredeemable worst-game-ever-made this game is certainly not.
-Page 1 of the Pac-Man Atari Manual
at that point in 1982, you could probably argue that those words in the manual were the biggest lie ever told in gaming. When it comes to converting arcade games to the ol' 2600, obvious compromises need to be made in order to crunch out that game essence. Some games, like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Berzerk, etc, make the conversion relatively unscathed. But sometimes you just get some absolute nonsense like Pac-Man. While this game is in literally no means an accurate conversion of the arcade classic, it does show some interesting insight into Atari history both in a cultural and gamedev sense.
So like, the game pretty much shares gameplay similarities with the arcade version and that's kind of it. You eat dots and avoid ghosts that chase you, but compared to the arcade the ghost AI is different, scoring is different, the hitboxes are different, the maze is different, you get the idea. The maze isn't even like a bastardized facsimile of the original, it's just a bunch of circles in a grid. The hitboxes for actually eating the
If you look at this game solely through the lens of how accurate of a conversion this is, it's pretty dire. But ngl this game is pretty cool to look at retrospectively. Atari crunched the fuck out of one guy in 6 months to make something they KNEW would sell millions on brand alone (and sell it did, this is the best-selling game on the system), and so within those constraints the guy likely chose to go for preserving what he believed to be the essence of Pac-Man, rather than trying to make a straight conversion with no proper time or resources. Honestly, the essence still comes through pretty well even in this conversion, and there are probably a solid amount of the 8 million copies sold were probably satisfied casual customers just trying to get their fill of eating dots and chasing ghosts without much care towards the details. It's also just that by 1982 the Atari 2600 was already roughly 5 years old, and Pac-Man was already 2, and many other people had understood standards of what they should be expecting from a first-party conversion of an immensely popular arcade title, and this definitely wasn't up to those expectations. Gaming wasn't a fad anymore, the market of core gamermen had bloomed by this point, and if there's anything we know about those guys it's that they have quite high standards for their gamin. As a result, this game (and it's partner in crime that would release at the end of the year, E.T.) could be described as one of the first games known to the general public as a "bad game", and are frequently cited by historians and fans alike as a major cause of the great American video game crash of '83 as well as being touted as some of the worst games ever made in the later internet sphere of things.
Do I think this game really deserves that kind of reputation though? I mean, kind of? It's not nearly as ambitious as something like E.T. and is a pretty blatant result of Atari cutting corners to get as much easy profit on their grubby hands at the cost of making a quality product for their consumers, so it's not exactly like this game is great or misunderstood or anything imo. The Atari could absolutely have done a more direct conversion of Pac-Man, as both the Ms. Pac man port and plenty of 2600 homebrew can prove, so it's not like it was entirely the hardware at fault either. I just think that the end product is such a fascinating result of so many factors that it's hard not to be curious about it. It will obviously never happen, but I do wish Namco would reference this bizarro version of Pac-Man or include it in compilations as a historical curio or something. If they had a 2600 pac-man skin in a championship edition game or something I would absolutely pop the fuck off ngl. I definitely still wouldn't really recommend it to anyone outside of the curious gaming historians out there in this day and age, but an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel irredeemable worst-game-ever-made this game is certainly not.