Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 68: Pac-Man

Episode Date: June 20, 2016

Steven Lin and Jaz Rignall join up to talk about Namco's all-time classic Pac-Man, as well as its spinoffs, sequels, and merchandizing. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, and Anamata Pea for eating. Hi, everyone, and welcome to whatever episode of Vetrotronauts that this is. It's an episode about Pac-Man, and I'm Jeremy Parrish. I'm here to talk about Pac-Man with some other people. It's actually the same crew that was with us for our backer-only Atari-Links episode. So if you haven't seen that, and you may not have, unless you're a cool Kickstarter backer for Retronauts from several years ago, why don't you guys introduce yourselves, starting on my right?

Steve Lynn, avid game collector and historian, and also recovering from Pac-Man fever. Oh. Hey, and I'm Jazz Wrignell. A long-time gamer since the late 70s, so I've been around for an awfully long time. And finally, I'm Bob Mackey. I have Pac-Man tuberculosis, and it's fatal.

So I won't be around for much longer. The Pac-Man consumption. Yeah. I'm being eaten live from the inside. Yeah, he's eating the dots in your soul. I did not mean to be that clever, but I'll take full credit. Yeah. So, anyway, Bob, you're the only one in here.

who wasn't alive for the release of Pac-Man. I was going to say, I still considered myself old, but I am not older than Pac-Man. I'm only one year younger than Pac-Man. Pac-Man's 81, I'm 82, so I was born into a post-Pak-Man world. Wow. What was that like?

I don't... I mean, for me, I think Miss Pac-Man might have been the first arcade game I actually played. Actually, I think for me also. Yeah, and I remember standing on a milk crate and not really understanding a whole lot. But, yeah, so I feel like that is how you introduce a child to video games. like, oh, play Pac-Man, it's easy, it's simple.

So I think that's why I was just sat down in front of it. Yeah. And then the rest of us are old-timers, although I'm at the age where I wasn't really going to arcades, you know, like age four or five when Pac-Man came out. So, again, I didn't discover it until Miss Pac-Man, which I remember playing for the first time, seeing for the first time, in the middle of a Sears lawn and garden section. because this was the era where people just put video game machines anywhere. It didn't matter where they, like, the kind of, you know, those entry cubicle areas for... I think it's called a mudroom in oldie-timey talk. I was going to say mudroom, but is that what you call it when it's...

Yeah, vestibule. That's good. I like muddial. For like, you know, for a convenience store. Like, just anywhere. Just if you have an electrical outlet and it's not wet, there, you can put a video game there. So in the middle of all the writing mowers there was in this Pac-Man, sure, why not? So I played that there, and a lifelong affection was born.

Steve, where did you grow up? I'm just curious. So I grew up in Ohio. Okay, me too. I forgot about that. And I was wondering, like, they don't have those vestibules and grocery stores out here. That felt like a very Midwestern thing because I think it was there for the weather, because you would encounter inclement weather and you don't want to track all that crap into their store.

There's no weather in California. No, I mean, at least not in the Bay Area. But, I mean, I just, I wonder if that was a common thing to find, to not have those in grocery stores and stuff outside of the Midwest. Yeah, I played a Missile Command in, like, the Montgomery Ward Vest of Bule. So it was like, yeah, right there. Yeah, they said it was pretty much everywhere that we had, the Kmart had an arcade. Yeah, mine too. Just give us a comparative analysis to how things were in the UK.

This is a history of mud rooms. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you kind of had. Were you like a Tesco or something? Um, no arcade machines in supermarkets, but they were all in the fish and chip shops and kebab shops and things like that. So, again, anywhere you could stick an arcade machine, you know, if the owner owned the store, then they would have a couple of machines in there. So the 7-Eleven equivalents might have something like that too. But we had lots of arcades.

Most city centers had an arcade. And so, you know, you'd just go to one of those, basically. For restaurants, restaurants here, I don't remember seeing arcade games outside of pizza shops. Pizza parlor has always had arcade game, which makes sense because, you know, pizza takes a while to prepare. So the kids are sitting restlessly. What do you do? You give them some quarters and send them over to the video games. Oh, yeah.

I don't think I saw, you know, arcade machines in like a McDonald's or something until the end of the 90s and occasionally like a Neo-Geo AES would show up in a McDonald's. But generally, yeah, it was pretty much just the pizza places. All of my pizza places at one particular restaurant, which was a local chain, it was always serenaded by the punchout machine. So you're just eating pizza. Your body blow, body blow. Upper God. Was this like one of those pizza amusement places? No, it was just like a pizza place, but there were three arcade cabinets in the pizza place, just like kind of near the doors.

So, yeah. You were serenaded by that lovely announcer. We had them in Ground Round and Ponderosa. Oh, yeah, we had those. So we had arcade machines there. But actually, maybe they were the steakhouses. Yeah. Jazz, I had a question for the machines in UK, were they cocktail or upright?

They're almost always upright. Cocktail cabinets. They used to put those in pubs. You know, so you could bring your pint on them. And, you know, that made a lot of sense. But, but yeah, most arcades were, you know, in city centers. And they would have slot machines, fruit machines, one-arm bandits, or whatever you wanted to call them, which were all legal for.

kids to play because gambling is highly legal in the UK and and there's some crazy statistic like 99% of UK citizens gamble in some way, shape or form. So, so they would have, the arcade will be half full with, um, video games and then half full with, with one-arm bandits. Wow. That's pretty much Las Vegas now. Yes. Except all the video games are, uh, slot machines. It's like Castlevania, the erotic slots or whatever it is. Erotic violence. Um, yeah. So, So Pac-Man was very much a part of that time where video games were kind of embryonic, not just in terms of game design, but their place in the world. You know, video games really started in the 70s, but they were mostly for bars and, you know,

places to kind of kill time for adults. And Pac-Man, I think, was really sort of an important step toward making video games more kid-friendly. So that was 1980, 1981. You know, before that, my impression at least is that arcade games were something you saw around, but it wasn't really that big a deal. Like you had your home pong clones and maybe your Atari 2,600, but arcade machines were kind of maybe for like the older kids. Pac-Man was something that everyone loved, kids, men, women, teenagers.

it was just like this kind of universal obsession and Japan kind of had its own obsession with video games a few years prior with Space Invaders. My understanding is that that craze was not nearly as big in the West. Like people liked Space Invaders and knew what it was and it had some kind of, you know, pop culture presence, but it wasn't until Pac-Man hit that all of a sudden video games became this phenomenon

and everyone wanted to play Pac-Man. Everyone wanted to play video games. everyone wanted to clone Pac-Man to make people play their video games. It was really just a massive hit. And it's interesting because Pac-Man did, like Space Invaders, start out in Japan. And it did really well there, too. But I've always had the impression that Pac-Man was much, much more successful in the West than in Japan. Do you think Space Invaders was more popular in Japan because it's secretly about sushi?

I'm not being a smart-ass. Pac-Man has identifiable things to eat for Americans in the 80s. I don't think we were ready for sushi, you know, yet. I'm being completely serious. I'm just curious. I mean, there's a cultural connection there that I think that might have been lost on us. I don't think people played Space Invaders and were like, man, why do I feel so hungry? It's the fun sushi shoot them up.

Again, I'm being serious. I mean, yeah, I've made the joke before. Like, oh, you're blowing up sushi. But I don't know that that was necessarily. I don't look at, you know, like a kind of vaguely crab-shaped alien and see in my mind like crab meat sitting on a bed of rice. With Pac-Man, it's like, I've eaten cherries and keys before. I've eaten in a Galaxian, sure.

Yeah, of course. Anyway, I'm sorry for the disruption. No, that's okay. It's an interesting question. I can't answer that because I'm not a cultural psychologist. I couldn't say. I mean, maybe you have something there. But...

Think of peace. Yeah, I don't know why Space Invaders was a really big deal there, and Pac-Man was a really big deal here. Well, Space Invaders, it just... I think that became one of those sort of Asian fad things. Everybody started playing it, so then everybody started playing it. And I don't think...

Yeah, that is very much a part of Japanese culture. I don't know if it's pan-Asian. I don't know enough about other Asian cultures. But definitely in Japan, like, if something becomes popular, it's really popular. And then all of a sudden, it's not. Yeah. And then I think Pac-Man, when it came out, had a lot more competition.

In the marketplace, people had been playing a lot of other clones and everything else. And in the United States, I think we were going to talk about where did people play arcade games before they started showing up in malls. I think it was a lot of pinball parlors, right, that started adding in, you know, video here and there. And then all of a sudden, video started becoming more profitable than pinball and started pushing out some of the pinball machines, and they became more like the arcades we think of now.

So, you know, it's part of that. And it's a cute character. I think when we're going to talk about it did appeal to women and all of a sudden everybody wanted to play it. Yeah, Space Invaders, I think, also kind of tapped into the Star Wars zeitgeist and Star Wars was really popular

in Japan. Like, if you look back, you know, there's like Star Wars manga and stuff like that, but in TV shows of the era there's always like random Star Wars references, you know, Gynax cartoons, what is it like the Dikon anime

and then... The Darth Vader shows up in that. Like, well, there's Ursa Yatsura, Lum, which was extremely inspired by Star Wars. Not closely, it's not like Battlestar Galactica inspired, but just, you know, that same sort of vibe. So you had kind of, you know, space aliens attacking, and the monster on the side of the space invaders' cabinet kind of looks like an electrical Chewbacca almost. So I think, I think, you know, it arrived in 1978, so Star Wars was just a year old at that point and was continuing to pick up steam. It was one of those things where it didn't start out as a massive hit. It started out doing pretty well, but as it became, you know, more and more and more people became obsessed with it,

it rolled out to more and more theaters. And so Star Wars had kind of this unusual life cycle for, you know, media properties these days, where it's snowballed over time. Kind of like, you know, we've talked about Dragon Quest doing that, the original Dragon Quest, where it was kind of like, oh, yeah, that's pretty cool. Oh, no, actually, that's really cool. Okay, now everyone's playing it. Yeah, all of a sudden it's a big deal. I think it's just the way movies were released then. You couldn't just, they weren't just everywhere at once.

They would just pick up steam throughout the country until they, yeah. Well, and also Fox didn't have any confidence in Star Wars. There's a whole story there about how it was like not supposed to be their big movie, but it just became like this thing that no one believed in and all of a sudden everyone wanted to see. But I do think that, you know, space invaders kind of lucked into that timing. But Pac-Man was something different. And it was, I think, maybe, you know, part of what, made it so appealing to people everywhere is that it was finally an attempt to break away from

the space invaders clones because man once space invaders hit everyone was making clones like you know it's the the famous story about Nintendo kind of desperately creating donkey Kong to to fill 2,000 arcade units that they had been had stuck sitting in a warehouse in the US because it was a radar school another space invaders clone they made like three space invaders clones this year, and we're like, this is the one that Americans are going to love. And Americans were like, no. So, yeah, like everyone was doing a Space Invaders clone. And, you know, you can look at Atari 2,600 games and Intellivision games from around then. And you had all kinds of stuff like, you know, demons to diamonds or whatever. Everyone was trying to put their own spin on Space Invaders. And

then here was something completely different. And very colorful and vivid and fun and accessible. So intuitive, it didn't have any buttons. It had a control stick. The old buttons were to say one player or two players. Like, you don't get control. I mean, that's like iPhone simplistic. You know, it's a, it was very accessible, very pickup and play. And so I think, yeah, it was just kind of the perfect storm of a great looking game full of character, a very accessible game, a very different kind of game, and a game that was challenging

at first, but could be mastered. There was kind of logic to the behavior of things, and people would write big books about Pac-Man patterns because they could, you know, break it down to a science. I don't know if there was more than one model of the actual arcade cabinet, but there's an ancient one in my hometown that I would play every time I go back. And it's very, very small. And even the joystick is like this tiny little knobby thing.

Like it's not the big joystick you think of when you think of an arcade game now, like a fighting stick. It's just like this kind of tiny knob. Well, there's a cabaret cabinets, which are like maybe two-thirds. eyes and it's more like a flat screen than it doesn't go above you. Yeah, that could be it, yeah. Yeah, so they came out with three versions of it.

Oh, okay, cool. Upright, the cabaret, and the cocktail. Got it. That cabaret one's the one I play a lot. Yeah. Yeah, in my experience, Pac-Man control sticks were pretty knobby because you just had to move in the four directions, so they were really short sticks

with a big ball on them, and they were easy to, you know, push around in the direction you wanted to do. And I also like putting the coin in the slot in here, make the Pac-Man gulp noise. I love that part of arcade games, like when it makes a noise when you put a coin in. It's just a weird thing. that I don't experience anymore.

Yeah, and, you know, there were several different models of Pac-Man, including the original Japanese version, which was Pac-Man. They have one of those on display at Bandai Namco headquarters in Tokyo, or did, I think Bandai Namco just moved offices. I assume they're going to keep that little mini-museum set up, but you can actually see that. And I think I was with Chris Kohler at Super Potato, the retro game shop in Tokyo, and he found,

found a, I want to say, maybe I'm misremembering this. Is it a yellow one? But yeah, he found like a handheld, yeah, tommy system that said Puckman on it. Yeah. So it actually kind of made its way into the market a little bit that way before, of course, being changed to Pac-Man because it was much harder for Americans to vandalize Pac-Man into something obscene than Puck Man. Yeah. And even though the Anamontapia isn't the same, I think the word PAC makes more sense than Puck,

because he's kind of like packing things into his mouth, you know. Yeah, I don't know if it was supposed to be puckish or if he looked like a hockey puck, but it's actually the same, like, phonetically in Japanese, Paku Paku. You can write that as P-A-C or P-U-C, however you want. So, you know, it didn't actually change the name of the game for, you know, the creators. It was just romanizing it in a different way. It's different transliteration of it, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if you want to talk about sort of that appeal, I think the biggest thing for Pac-Man, obviously, you're not shooting anything, but there's that feeling of, oh, so close, or, you know, you trapped yourself, right? And I saw the ghost, I made the turn, and I locked myself in between two of them. I saw a lot of that when people would just be, you know, watching others play and realizing that, you know, they were going to, they're about to run into a wall or something. And it was an odd experience when it became so popular that they would. put another TV screen on top of the Pac-Man TV screen, so you can watch other people play Pac-Man. I never saw that. I haven't seen that either. I've seen that absurd today. Wow. No, I mean, I can see that with, like, with fighting games now.

I mean, there's entire tournaments built around that concept, but, yeah, that must have been something like the original DS. Yeah. Yeah, so, of course, I think by this point, everyone knows the origin story of Pac-Man, but it probably wouldn't hurt for us to go over it again just to be, you know, comprehensive. But the guy who designed Pac-Man was a fellow named Toru Iwatani,

and he worked at Namco and had designed a few games before. I think he designed Gibi and a couple of others. and his goal was to create a game, like Steve said, that would appeal to women. This was very much in kind of the era of like boy versus girl marketing and design. So he sat down and thought about it and thought, what do women like? Women like to eat. And I guess that is kind of a Japanese thing. You know, women are supposed to be very petite and delicate, but also they're allowed to eat desserts, whereas men aren't.

I've seen a lot of anime and women love to go to dessert shops in a lot of. Yeah, no, I mean, it's fictionalized versions of Japan. It's very, like, there's definitely some gender segregation to it. Like, dudes who eat desserts, kind of weird. But, yeah, women, you know, there's amazing, elaborate, fancy desserts for women to enjoy. There's entire, like, very pink pastel cafes for them to go to and have crazy blanx and things like that. So you're not allowed to eat dessert, though. I have no dessert shame.

So, yeah, so that's really kind of where that came from. And, you know, having read interviews with him, like, it lines up with just kind of what I've experienced and observed spending time in Japan. So, yeah, it makes sense. And I think, you know, to his credit, he didn't create a game that was, like, pink and flowery and, you know, kind of the stereotype visual markers of what we think women are girls like. It was a much more, it was a colorful game, but, you know, it kind of had that stark black, and then there were, the maze was defined with electric blue. And Pac-Man himself was bright yellow, and then all the ghosts chasing him were different colors, some primary colors, some secondary, and they, you know, turn into blue ghosts, you know, shadows of themselves

when you eat an energizer. So very, very few colors, but all very bright, like everything popped against that black background, And it just looked really appealing. And you have to keep in mind, you know, color video games were only a couple of years old at that point. Galaxian was the most important Space Invaders clone because it introduced color. And that was 1979. So Pac-Man came along a year and a half, two years later and was still kind of riding that, wow, technicolor wave. And it was a great-looking game.

Like the very kind of minimal, simplistic, bright colors on top of black. just made it really pop out. And, you know, you're playing games on those old phosphor screens on, you know, the CRTs for arcade machines, everything is just so luminous and bright. Pac-Man really, like, you need to play it in an arcade cabinet to really appreciate how nice it looked. Yeah, I really, I love that arcade cabinet.

The dedicated upright, it's bright yellow, and it's got the Pac-Man with legs on the side. Shoveling ghosts into his mouth? Well, he's not actually. He's running, and then there's a lot. a big, like, blue ghost with, like, a space invaders, like, mouth, like, coming down from the upper, upper, love. I'm thinking of different art.

The one I'm thinking of is, like, this huge Pac-Man, and he's, like, got his mouth open, kind of, like, a stork, and he's just, like, shoveling ghosts in, and they're kind of hanging out, like, ah. Like, the Atari 800 box, where he's got, like, a hat and, like, the arms and legs. Oh, man, I love that. I love that one. That is something I wanted to ask everybody. He's, like, wearing a floppy fedora.

Oh, that one. Yeah. I don't want to ask everybody, what is their favorite interpretation of Pac-Man? because I always found the midway art to be like, he looked like a goblin, like a weird, like bulgy goblin. But I love that art that's on the Pac-Man telephone that Steve has. It's Pac-Man with the long nose.

He's got to have the long nose. He's got to have the gloves and the boots and the Pac-Man eyes, like the Betty Boop kind of eyes. Like that is my favorite Pac-Man. The other ones, I'm not so fond of, but that is great. And I can take Pac-Land, do with the hat. That's fine. But, I mean, that's my ideal Pac-Man.

How about everybody? Sorry, I'm not trying to take the show over. I just, I need to know. What's your favorite Pac-Man? I like the Pac-Man with the nose. I mean, that's kind of how I see it nowadays. That or when it's just like the yellow, you know, it's a circle in the mouth and the eye. Yeah, I'm a traditionalist.

I like the traditional Pac-Man looking just like a round circle, like a piece of pizza. Jazz is a Pac-Man conservative. Yes, absolutely. None of this hat nonsense and legs and arms. These Pac-Bans with their hats and their arms these days. I guess my mental canon of Pac-Man. is the one that was on all the merchandise that I remember at the time. And it's kind of the in-between point of, like, simple Pac-Man and, you know, Namco, Japanese Pac-Man with the nose.

It's the one where he has legs and arms, but his body, like, he's just, you know, the round Pac-Man. Yeah. And just a yellow circle with a mouth. But then he has the Betty Boop eyes, and they're – I can't tell if they're – they're this way on the box. Okay. Yeah, the indentations and the eyes are face. facing different directions. So it's pretty, I think it was pretty heavily based on the Namco art, but streamlined a lot.

You know, wearing gloves, wearing boots. We are in this age where branding is everything, and I find it weird that so many different versions of Pac-Man were allowed to coexist together. It just was like... Well, a lot of them weren't licensed, and that was something that I've heard is that Namco was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to stop all of these renegade versions of Pac-Man appearing on underwear and TV trays and lunchboxes. And there was actually very few officially licensed stuff.

Most of it was just people just copying Pac-Man and making their own thing. That is true. Like, I think Pac-Man is an easy enough character to copy. It's easy to make a bootleg. Making a bootlegs like Simpsons thing is a little harder. Like you can tell that, oh, that person did not know how to draw Bart or like Homer with dreadlocks or whatever. Well, no, I think most of the Pac-Man stuff I remember was licensed, stuff like the Pac-Man

board game and so forth. That was probably a little bit later, maybe. Sort of in the early days. Yeah, like 83. Okay, yeah, I don't really remember all of that. I think I'm just a little too young to remember the early days. But I remember, you know, kind of like from this Pac-Man on. And I think by that point, maybe there was more consolidation and control over the marketing.

But I'm looking at the Pac-Man telephone box that Steve brought in. By the way, this Pac-Man telephone is amazing. It's just glorious. Like Pac-Man is eating your face. I want traditional telephones to come back just so I can have one of these and justify using it. Anyway, the artwork, you know, it's got the Namco Big Nose Pac-Man on it. But the ghosts on the side, the illustrations of the ghost, those are the same illustrations that I saw in American artwork. So I really feel like the American stuff was just taking the Japanese design, the Namco illustrations,

and just kind of simplifying and streamlining Pac-Man to be more. more American, whatever that means. But they kept the ghosts the same, or the monsters, if you prefer. Yeah. Plus, the, the Pact, the C, and Pac-Man has the flounder version of the Pac-Man, where he's got both eyes on the same side. It's very cubist. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, so basically the one I'm talking about remembering and seeing so much of is this flounder version, if you will, but with legs and arms. Yeah. And so kind of taking the logo and combining a little bit of the influence of the illustrations Anyway, we're spending a lot of time on this, but it's, you know, it's relevant. The art of Pac-Man. Because Pac-Man was pervasive in pop culture. Steve introduced himself with a reference to Pac-Man fever, I think.

Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. All right, yeah. And, I mean, this was a video game that someone had a pop hit single about. Like, that's a pretty big sea change for the place of video games. I don't think even Pet Rocks had a pop song about them. No, yeah, I guess there was no pet rock song. But, yeah, so I was six when Pac-Man came out.

And I remember after it became big, it's probably 82. You just started seeing Pac-Man stuff everywhere, which I was mentioned. And I think if you want to talk about memorable merchandise, I think everybody I knew had that Pac-Man TV tray, you know, the metal one with the fold-out legs. Yeah, even I did. Yeah, and so, you know, they don't, well, we talked about this, they don't, make those anymore, right? Can't get like a downtreys and a great idea. I think

eating in front of the TV was considered like a privilege and an honor now we're just all slobs and we're like I'm just going to eat out of my lap. Food can get everywhere. I don't care. Yeah, I see people eat and then wipe their hands on their jeans and I'm just like, oh no, who are you? What kind

of pig style do you live in? That's not a dinner fork. That's a salad fork. That's a chilled. Just use a fork, please for the love of God. Yeah, just a bit trough. Like the Pac-Man trough. didn't have that. But yeah, you know, I have the phone here. And then also that trash can, that sort of oval trash can that they made.

I mean, it was like strawberry shortcake and all these other license. But I just, I remember that Pac-Man one because it was, you know, I wanted to have sort of the Pac-Man room where you had the curtains and the sheets and everything else. I never really got there. I just had the TV tray. I had a great, like, vintage Pac-Man teacher from the 80s. I think I bought it around 2003 and it disintegrated a few years later. but it was that logo with that Pac-Man.

It was like a shiny, like, it was from that era, and I loved it so much, yeah. Was it an iron-on transfer type shirt? No, it was like an official Pac-Man thing. Like, it was made of the Pac-Man line of merchandising or whatever, yeah. Yeah, I remember actually, there was, you know, in elementary school, they had those craft fairs and people making, like, bootleg Pac-Man and ghost beanbags and all that stuff. That was the origin of Etsy. Yeah, it was pretty much that. I'd like you buy these like, oh, this is a great gift for my uncle.

As a little kid, I was very much about drawing and artsy, crafty type stuff. learned how to do needlepoint. So I made this, this is great. I made this pencil case for myself with needlepoint, and it was like Pac-Man. So it's like this kind of rectangular, just, I don't know, like a little compressed cube that you could put pencils in, but it was needle-pointed on all side. It was like Pac-Man on the front, and then I think I made dots or whatever you can, yeah. Okay, because I think I...

It wasn't like based on a pattern or anything. I just sat down with some graph paper. You know, it was probably like seven, so what kind of weird kid was I? I'm pretty sure I had an official cross-stitch. I did cross-stitch as a kid. Yeah, I did some of that too. What is this weird thing we have in common? Anyway, I did cross-stitch as a kid. I think it was just a thing back then. Yeah, I stopped doing it after I was like eight, but I remember there being an official Pac-Man like pattern that I did.

Like, my mom got me from the craft store. So Pac-Man was even infiltrating craft stores. Like, your kid can do this craft at home. Yep. I think that's something we've lost. Do you still have that pencil case? No, I wish I did. Oh, man, I have no idea what happened to it.

It was probably like when I was in high school, I was like, what is this stupid. thing. Yeah. Well, I think the other, you brought up the, the Tomy Pac-Man. I think the other big thing was being able to play Pac-Man at home. And so, like, the clique of arcades and then, Sonic Watch and, like, all these ways of sort of Pac-Man on the go.

And that gets that kind of dovetails into home versions. Yeah, I didn't, I never owned a Pac-Man game. Man, I think the first Pac-Man I ever bought, like, with my own money or owned in any sense was the NeoGeo Pocket Color version, if that's really late to the party. But I do remember, you know, in that era where everyone was knocking off Pac-Man and everyone wanted Pac-Man until they actually saw it on Atari 2,600, and we're like, maybe not. The one I owned was, it's either Junior Pac-Man or Pac-Man Jr. I don't know where the Junior goes in that, but it was the 260 one, and it is way better than the Pac-Man for that. I mean, it's actually playable, and I had a lot of fun with it.

I had no idea there was a bad Pac-Man until much later. Well, we didn't have a video game system at the time. So I did end up getting a... Well, my parents bought an Epic Man, which was made by Epic, hence the name. But it's pretty much like a little miniature LED or LCD Pac-Man clone. It was very much game and watch style,

except in being, you know, landscape format. It was portrait format. But I remember, you know, seeing that, I think, like, the best products where my aunt worked and being like, wow, it's a Pac-Man game that I could own.

It's like 20 bucks. That's cool. My parents said, oh, I don't know. You don't need that. And then sometime later, I was sitting at home and I heard Epic Man.

I knew that noise. I heard that sound and I ran into the other room. I was like, did I just hear, you know, Pac-Man game? And they were like, no, we don't know.

But then the next day they gave me the Epic Man. And I think the score on that maxed out at 999. And I had that thing maxed and then it would just like stop playing it was like you won all the all the LCD pieces

flashed on and then flashed off was that the kill screen of uh yeah it was pretty much yeah I thought so yeah I played that thing a lot yeah Billy Mitchell's got nothing on you you had the first perfect pack where's your hot sauce brand I need to start wearing ties with Epic Man on them right behind an American flag or whatever

yeah so um what about you guys I mean Bobby said you owned one of the probably Junior Pac-Man yeah junior Pac-Man it was It was fun. Baby Pac-Man was a pinball game. Right. For some reason, I think the junior was before Pac-Man. I don't know.

I don't know the Pac-Man family. I don't know how they're related. But it was just like Pac-Man, except I think the mazes were a little bit bigger. And instead of eating, instead of eating fruit and things, you ate toys, like a tricycle, like a ball, like a thing like things like that. It was basically, yeah. And I don't think the Sprite, no, the Sprite had a little beanie with a spinning propeller on it. So we'll talk more about the sequels and Ersats sequels. But I'm curious, what kind of experience did you guys have as, you know, Pac-Man owners at the time?

I think we were all kind of in the same boat being young and not having control of our own finances or any finances to speak of. So I'm curious, like, did you have to play to the arcades? Did your parents own a game system? Did you get a clone? I was lucky enough that I was just old enough. I was 15 at the time the first Pac-Man machine was delivered into our local arcade. I actually remember it being delivered, a couple of them being delivered. and that was a major deal.

Oh, new machine, what is this thing? And looking at the side of the cabinet and it's not looking like a shooter and just, well, what the hell kind of game is this? And, you know, they were installed in our arcade and we just waited around for them to be turned on as soon as they turned on, one of my friends dropped in a 10 pence piece, this was in England,

and started playing, and we all just crowded around and looked. And just it was sort of a funny experience to sort of see this game for the first time and sort of it didn't involve shooting so you know immediately became obvious all right this is amazing you have to eat all of the dots

but you know didn't know that the fact that when you ran over a power pill an energizer that you could actually eat the ghosts we just thought it just made them run away for a little bit so that that took us a not very long to figure out but

but it did take a you know an accident incidental collision with the blued ghost to sort of, oh, oh, now you can go, you can actually kill them and score more points. And that took, that took a few minutes. But it's just fun playing the game and having something different. I mean, I can't think of any other game of the period that wasn't some kind of shooter, even missile command was ultimately a shooter.

It was all, you know, sort of asteroids and space invaders, Galaxians and, and those kinds of games and so it was that was really fun and you know we spent uh i guess it spring 1981 um i definitely remember shuffling quite a lot of money into that that that the game and just figuring out the fact that every time you played the ghosts would react the same way to to your your pattern that took us a while it probably took us a few weeks to sort of figure out that it was a pattern-based game. Because first of all, we were sort of playing freestyle, where you just sort of react to the ghosts and try and avoid them, and games wouldn't last very long playing like that.

And then, you know, as we sort of started playing and you just develop a sort of a patent, an efficient pattern to play, you began to realize, hey, hang on, they're doing the same thing every single time. And then that completely changed the sort of the paradigm of playing from freestyle to one of developing patterns that allowed us to eat all of the ghosts and be very efficient with our dot collecting. Yeah. So for me, I'd always bring quarters.

I'd actually go with my dad to pick up pizza because the pizza parlor had a Pac-Man machine. And so I would always bring a quarter or two to play. You know, my biggest Pac-Man memory is actually, on Sundays, we would go to Arby's for lunch and then we'd go to the arcade that was in the same strip mall. And my dad and I would play Miss Pac-Man against you. each other and, you know, cocktail styles were we sitting against. And that was one of the only times where he and I were kind of on a level playing field in some form of competition, right?

Like, ping pong, he'd destroy me or, you know, golfer and everything like that. But this was like where we would be able to see each other's progress, you know, week over week. And, you know, that was actually one of my first arcade restorations was building a misspac cocktail so that I could sort of relive some of those memories. Oh, great. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, for me, you know, the first game I played, remember playing was Ms. Pac-Man. And it's kind of funny because once Ms. Pac-Man showed up, Pac-Man just disappeared. I didn't see the actual Pac-Man in arcades for what seemed like forever. I remember finally seeing it at a skating rink. It must have been like three or four years after Ms. Pac-Man. Like, Miss Pac-Man was everywhere. And I never saw Pac-Man. So I was like, finally, I get to play the real thing, not just Ms. Pac-Man. And I played it and realized, oh, this isn't nearly as good as Ms. Pac-Man. Huh. Yeah.

Okay. Well, how about that? That was kind of a shock because I thought, like, you know, Pac-Man was this, you know, like, this game that I just had to play because it was the real thing. It was the original. It was where it all started. But it turned out that, no, it was, you know, improvement happened over time. I didn't see an actual Pac-Man machine until the late 80s. Like I said, Miss Pac-Man is probably the first video game I played.

And that was, that might have been, I might have been three. If I can remember as far back as two, it might have been 84. It could be 85, but yeah, it was Ms. Pac-Man, and then it wouldn't be five years until I saw, you know, regular Pac-Man in the wild. And there's a certain irony about that we can get into when we talk about Ms. Pac-Man. But I do want to go back to something that Jazz was talking about, about how games at the time were shooters. You had more variety in, you know, console games. You know, Atari 2,600 had stuff like Adventure, which was actually kind of a maze game before Pac-Man. but really for the most part

it was sports or shooting and you know Pac-Man was actually released contemporaneously with a maze-based racing game Rally X developed by Namco and at the you know the arcade amusement show that year everyone was like oh Rally X this is going to be the game and it has kind of a similar premise to Pac-Man

not just the fact that it's a you know a maze chase game but it well not just a maze game but also a chase game I mean, there's, you know, these cars coming after you, and you have a very limited ability to kind of turn the tables. In this case, you know, RallyX, you can drop a smokescreen that causes them to spin out. I thought RallyX was the same thing as Defender. It was, I've read a few anecdotes or stories about how they were shown at the same show. It might have come out sooner. I think Rally X was like late 80 and Pac-Man was early 81, but they were right around the same time and developed pretty much in tandem.

and I don't know what it was like in Japan, but in America, you know, people had kind of their chips on RallyX, but that wasn't the one that turned out to be the big hit. But the element of, you know, I guess, you know, in shooting games, it's pretty much equal footing. Like you're shooting, the other person's shooting. It's, you know, kind of one-on-one mono-a-mano. Or in the case of Space Invaders, there's a lot of them, but you're still, you know, kind of firing back at them. Whereas Pac-Man, you're defenseless. You're being chased.

you're being pursued by all these ghosts, and the kind of ability to turn the tables is very rare, it's a precious thing, and it really kind of informs the way the game flows and moves and builds your, you know, like shapes your strategies. You really think, like, you know, how much of the maze can I clear before I start taking the energizers and how can I lure the ghosts so I can get as many of them close to me

when I take the energizer so that I can eat them all and maximize my score? It really, it creates a different kind of play than was really existent at that point. Yeah, definitely. I think it was just, there was absolutely nothing like it. I mean, Raleigh X was definitely, I think that did come just before it. I mean, I certainly in the UK, I saw Rally X before I saw Pac-Man by a couple of months. But I think that the fact that it was also a pattern-based game also made it really different.

You know, Space Invaders sort of had a pattern. to a technique, but you were still having to be very careful about, you know, dodging bullets and there was that sort of random element. But with Pac-Man, you could really rely on those patterns and develop them. And that's what gave birth to all of those Pac-Man books, you know, that were bestsellers incredibly. I didn't like Rowley-X when I played it. And I think where Pac-Man has the advantages, you're always, like, eating something.

You're always getting that feedback. I think a rally-X are just collecting flags that are just, like, around. corners and stuff, right? Yeah. I've got dots as well. Oh, okay. Are there dots in RaleeX? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

No, I don't think so. I think you're just grabbing flags. Yeah, they'd avoid. But I mean, but in Pac-Man, you're always, like, doing something except when, you know, the corridor is cleared of dots. So I feel like that feedback makes you feel good, like just hearing that, you know, the eating noises. Well, in the, don't you move more quickly in Pac-Man when you're in the clear?

Yeah. Don't the dots slough you down very slightly? They do. So even that becomes, yeah, that becomes even a part of the strategy. Like, the ghost skip. pretty fast pretty quickly. So it's hard to outrun them. Yeah, turn the corners. Yeah. The collision detection is actually very generous. You don't die as soon as the ghost like brushes up against you. They actually have to overlap you, which really I think is a great element. It leads to so much

tension. Like when you're trying to chase, you know, race away from a ghost and it's catching up to you and it starts to overtake you like it's physically overtaking you. And then you turn the corner and you get a little bit of a jump on it. It's just like, you know, white knuckle. exciting. It's really like just a little, a great visual sign. The game wouldn't be nearly as fun if the ghosts could just kill you instantly on contact. You really have to it creates

some great moments and becomes very memorable. And I think Virale X didn't work as well as Pac-Men. Another reason is that you don't see the entire maze at once. It has a defender-style radar. And there's a radar too. I think that is just like one step too far for 1980

for people just getting it. Like I, when I played it like maybe 98-99, Namco museum, I'm like, I don't like this. Like, it's, it's just one step too far for a maze game, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was a very advanced idea and very sophisticated, but

there is something immediate about Pac-Man, about being to take in the entire maze, and when you get Pac-Man games where the maze scrolls, it stops being as much fun. Really great music in Rally-X though. I like the song. Super catchy. Yeah, and Emco always did great music. But something jazz mentioned is the pattern element of the game, but

the great thing about Pac-Man is that you can have a great time with it and pick it up and play it without realizing that there are patterns. And, you know, it lends itself to casual play. Like, I don't think a lot of people who just picked up and played Pac-Man, you know, like, you know, your parents or whatever who knew what Pac-Man was and would occasionally just toss a quarter in to be amused. I don't think they knew about the patterns, but that is just kind of like this extra level of depth to the game.

Yeah. And really kind of became something that later Pac-Man games reacted to. Ms. Pac-Man, I know, definitely took away the pattern-based style. So it becomes this more dynamic game, but, you know, I think most people find Miss Pac-Man to be a better game. So the patterns have a place, but it creates a different play experience than something that's more reactive and has better AI. Yeah, basically, it's all to do with the ghosts wanting to head into a corner under certain

conditions. And basically, in Pac-Man, they always head towards the same corner, and then Miss Pac-Man and they randomly go to one of the four corners. And that's the only difference between the two games. But it was enough to completely throw patterns off. Right. And, you know, you couldn't rely on them anymore. And one of the really interesting, clever elements of Pac-Man and this Pac-Man,

like all the games, is that each of the ghosts has its own personality, so to speak, which is just a pattern of behavior that kind of is a reaction to the player's actions. You know, there's speedy who moves most quickly and bashful who tries to avoid Pac-Man. It kind of moves, you know, still trying to catch Pac-Man, but we'll take a more circuitous route to get there. And, you know, there's a ghost that goes straight after you and is a really active pursuer. And, you know, having those four different AI patterns really, becomes a big part of the game too, because you know, while you're trying

to avoid one ghost, there's maybe another one that's kind of looping around and seems like it's not doing anything, but then it ends up cutting you off, and you have to really be careful of that. So there's just, there's so much to Pac-Man despite its seeming simplicity. It's such a great game. Yeah, I think that simplicity is really what

makes everybody, like, why everybody at least played or tried it. Yeah. And I's like, okay, I see everything that I need to see. There's only one control mechanism. I just need to eat dots, right? Yeah. It's like, I don't need to worry about radars or smokescreens or anything else. And so, you know, it got people to, oh, this video entertainment might be something that's interesting.

You know what I like to shoot. So I think we've talked about, made a pretty good case for why Pac-Man was a big, big deal at the time that it came out. And naturally, everyone wanted a piece of it. We talked a little bit about clones and bootleg merchandise, but even official merchandise and official port to the game, we're not necessarily the greatest. I think, you know, Pac-Man has,

sort of an infamous role in the history of video games. Its role has been overstated a bit through the years, but nevertheless, it's still emblematic of things that were wrong in the early 80s. And that, of course, is the Atari 2,600 version of the game. I know people kind of operate under the urban legend that the Pac-Man, all on its own, managed to destroy the home console games industry around the world. But it's not really true. The console industry was in bad shape already, and, you know, it was kind of like a last days of Rome thing where what happened with Pac-Man for 2,600 was really more just a sign of how broken and screwed up the games industry was.

You know, that and E.T. also, they just sank a ton of money into those games and produced way too many of them, and they weren't good. Pac-Man was just The 2,600 port was not good It was made by one guy in six weeks And the 2600 just didn't have the power To match the arcade machine There have been some good conversions of Pac-Man games You know, good compromised versions

But this one wasn't it He needed more time than he had, poor Todd Frye We also needed more memory, right? They used a 4K cart instead of 8 Because they wanted to cost-cutting methods They wanted to maximize their profits, so he just didn't have enough space on the cartridge, yeah. Was six weeks a short amount of time to develop a $2,600 games? I'm not sure, like, what a development cycle would be like when you're working with that little...

Game development cycles back then were short, but not that short. That was really short. Yeah, well, the game made Todd a millionaire, though, because he got 10 cents for each cart. And his first bonus check was, like, $320,000, and he photocopied it and put it on his office door. I didn't realize they were getting royalties at that point. This was, like, one of the first deals, actually. Yeah, because I know it's how Activision was formed, correct? Right.

People wanted royalties, but they, and credit, period, right? Right. I think they realized they needed to do some sort of retention and, like, well, let's give them some minuscule amount for each cart. And, yeah, I think there's a story, there's a ton of stories of, like, how he demanded the 10 cents or whatever. But according to, I think it was like a Reddit thread or maybe Atari H where he chimed in and basically said, like, no, that's what they gave me.

I was super excited when I got a 300,000. $1,000 check, he was screaming and running around the office. But, yeah, he was really hampered. I think the thought was people care more about the experience and not necessarily, like, sort of an arcade perfect port. And they just, like, here's the experience, even though it's terrible. And, yeah, you know, as Jeremy mentioned, the 2,600 really, like, you had to flicker the ghosts on and off. Yeah. Yeah. To keep to have four, like, sort of on the screen. The dots are rectangles for some reason. Yeah. We cannot render a dot on the screen. It's too. Well, the resolution was just completely horrendously wrong, and the aspect ratio was wrong for that particular game. I mean, this is a portrait game, and, you know, he's trying to stick it into landscape with this incredibly low resolution, and, you know, all things considered, is a miraculous that he actually managed to produce something in six weeks, but it was just terrible. It just didn't play well, and there was no real progression at all. It was also his first game for Atari. So this was Todd Fry's first game to program And I think there was someone that had a defender or something

And then he got assigned a Pac-Man and like, all right, here we go You know, it's weird because I never really played that much of Pac-Man for 2600 But what I have played, like the sound effects for that game are just as memorable to me As the arcade Pac-Man sound effects. Like that, they don't fit the game at all. They sound nothing like the arcade, but it's like bram, bam, bam, bam, boo, boo. Actually, up until maybe five years ago, if a character played a video game on a TV show or a movie, they would play those sound effects. I swear to God, it was like Pac-Man Atari.

They were just like an old record that somebody had. Like, here's your video game sound effects, sir. It's like... It's like the Wilhelm scream. Yeah, exactly. It's always put in the... Yeah. But they have PlayStation controllers.

This makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. But I remember when that version came out and we got it. and I think everybody bought it that I knew that it had a 2,600, and we were all really disappointed. I think people tried to like it because, like, you know, I just spent $50 on the, or I mean, the time 40 on this game.

It must be good, right? This is just like playing Pac-Man. But then, you know, the more he played it, that one got sent to the bottom of the stack really fast. I don't know what kind of technical wizardry they used to make Junior Pac-Man work. It was not like an arcade experience But it was functional And it played okay

Like Miss Pac-Man worked out pretty well In 2600 too Oh Miss Pack? I didn't play that version of it Yeah Well they got better right I think they learned like more tricks A lot of this is in what

Racing the Beam right Yeah that's right They just learn different things They use AK ROMs and not 4K And there's been some amazing home brews Like Halo Yeah well Halo yeah That's the one I know the most

And then yeah there's With Zippy the Hedgehog or Zippy the Porcupine, which is Sonic the Hedgehog and Princess Rescue, but they've even been Pac-Man, 8K ROMs that just look way closer. You know, if that would have been launched at the time, I think we would have been blown away. But, you know, it wasn't. And as a result, you know, like a perfect home port of Pac-Man

became kind of a Holy Grail object. And it was something people pursued for years. The NES version turned out pretty well. There were actually two, weren't there? Like, Namco produced one and Tengen produced one, and they weren't the same game, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's correct. They were different.

Yeah, but... I don't know which is better. I haven't really played either one of them. I don't think I've put enough time into either one to really make a judgment either. I think one of them gives you an option to view the whole maze or scroll it. I'm not mistaken.

Oh, maybe that's... Maybe that's the Namco one. Yeah, I think that's the Namco one. I don't want to make a statement on this, I don't know and someone will correct me. So please, let us know in the comments. But there have been a few ports of the game that have been regarded really highly.

The Neo Geo Pocket Color one is really highly regarded. I think that's another one where, if I'm remembering right, you can either view like the whole maze or just a portion of it, scroll up and down. But one of the great things about that, you know, the Neo Geo Pocket was just a, like the system design was really great, and it had this really great D-PAD on it.

It was actually like a little miniature stick and it clicked into place. But Pac-Man came with a little ring that you put over the stick. Oh, that's perfect. And it would constrain the directions to cardinal directions, the stick to cardinal directions. So you could only go up down, left, right. And you didn't have to worry about, you know, straying into a diagonal and not having a clear sense of direction for Pac-Man. So, like, that made it really playable and really fun. It was a great idea to ship the game with a tiny little peripheral that probably cost, you know, a tenth of a cent to produce.

I feel like Namco did that a lot. Just a cheap piece of plastic. There was the slider for the Arconoid game, and wasn't there something for space invaders? Oh yeah, Napko was like crazy into peripherals. JogCon and all that cool stuff. Jocon, Nekon, GunCon, like all those PlayStation peripherals. Arkenoid was Taito, though. Oh, yeah, sorry, yeah.

I'm just thinking of portables with like their own little screw-on attachments. I don't know that Namco published Pac-Man on Neo Geo Pocket. I think that might have been published by S&K. I think it was like if you weren't Capcom or Sega, then you were published by S&K because of the market for that system there was no third-party support. So S&K kind of did like Sega did

with the master system and just did everything themselves. But it turned out great. Yeah, Jeremy, you bring up a really good point about kind of the locking into four-way. You know, if you even think about like Pac-Man on the 5200, you had that crazy joystick and so you're constantly like not able to make the turns

and, you know, now with 8-way D-Pads, same problem. I see that a lot in like, you know, bad word here, like maim cabinets, people are using just like the eight-way bat handle joysticks and you don't have that level of control and that was what made the Atari 2,600 and I guess like for me, the best versions that I had played were on the computers like Atari 800

and Comedar 64, I think, were the best at the time. Yeah, it's weird that the game is so simple that it requires almost a special controller because other controllers, like playing Pac-Man with an analog stick, no thanks, I don't want to do that. you really need that cardinal direction, that very limited control stick. Although it does work with the jumping 30 years into the future,

the super advanced remakes for Xbox and PS3 where the game is designed to sort of like roll yourself around corners with the analog stick. So they made it work for that. That was a very smart choice, I think. Yeah, definitely. So, you know, you had people trying to make Pac-Man for home systems. Atari got the exclusive rights to it,

which was a huge coup. and then, you know, after that collapsed, I think Namco published it as an early third-party title for Famicom, and that, you know, came to NES, and then there was the whole kerfuffle with Tengen, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, it kind of rolled out to home consoles, lots of computer ports, Atari 800, ST, et cetera, lots and lots of clones. Wow, so many clones. But, you know, another interesting kind of side effect. of Pac-Man's popularity was, of course, people wanted sequels right away.

And Namcoe took its time with sequels. It didn't make just a ton of sequels to Pac-Man. Let's see, it was Super Pac-Man, and that was very much like the original Pac-Man, except weird. Like, Superman, or Pac-Man could turn into, like, a Super Pac-Man, hence the name, and fly over the maze. So it made it look like he turned into a giant,

but the idea was supposed to be that he was flying above the maze. I never got that. I didn't get that metaphor. Okay, well, I was like, he just gets big. That's weird. Well, that's why he doesn't eat stuff when he's giant. And he's not over the doors, basically? Yeah, like you're not, you don't have to worry about the monsters.

You don't have to worry about doors and stuff because you're flying over them. But you also can't eat the stuff in the maze. But, you know, you mentioned Bob the importance of the pellets in the maze and how there's kind of this, you know, like. territory control element to it, and that was really taken out for Super Pac-Man. Instead of having the dots, you just had, like, certain areas that were covered with apples. Yeah, just like, you're just only eating fruit in the game, yeah. It was kind of weird, and it lost something.

You know, I contend that Pac-Man's biggest design innovation was not the maze game, but rather the territory control concept, because that was something that you didn't really do in video games, but it's become a huge part of video games. Like, you were, you know, taking over the maze by passing over the paths and eating the dots. You were turning them from basically white to black. And, you know, your goal was to conquer the entire maze by changing the color. And that became part of games like, you know, direct clones like Crush Roller and games like Cubert. But you even see it now in games like Splatoon. Like the whole point of Splatoon is taking over as much of the map as you can.

And it feels good to just, you know, have control over the environment. I find it weird that they did not put Toriwitani to work in the Pac-Man. minds for like five years because he made Super Pac-Man and then he was just like, I'll make this thing called Libelrabble that no one will play. It's just like kicks with monsters games or quicks, however you say that. How do you say that game? Kix, quix? There's debate. Kixotic. Does it mean it's exotic? It does not. Okay. I will say that the Japanese version of the Game Boy game says Quicks in phonetic katakana. Okay. I'm going with that. So it's not kid tested, mother approved? It's not. Okay. So anyway, Super Pac-Man, kind of a weird sequel, like I said, really

abstract and kind of hard to understand. And then after that, they started going in kind of even stranger directions. The next game they made was Pac-and-Pal, where Pac-Man is, you know, kind of going through a more standard maze, and there's another creature who kind of helps you and kind of hinders you. It's, you have a very strange relationship with Pal, I have to say. It's what, Miru, right? Or Chompchomp, I think. I can't remember the name. I think Steve and I were looking at this before we started recording. I think Pac-Man's pal in this game got a makeover and became Lolo later in life.

Could be. It's like a little blob with shoes. He didn't succeed at Namco and went over to howl. Yeah, well, Chom Chomp is the dog from the cartoon. So, you know, that's probably where they got Chompchomp from. But I think in Japan it was something else. Well, was the game out before the cartoon? I should have looked up the date of the cartoon.

Yeah, we can look that up. I mean, it's probably pretty close. I mean, especially if they called it Chompchomp. Like, I don't see them like... Although that's, you know... What you're doing in... 82, sorry. And Pac-and-Pal's 83.

Okay. Oh, yeah. Well, the next game that Namco produced really was based on the cartoon, and that was Pac-Land, which is, you know, noticeable for being one of the first platforms, like scrolling platformer games.

It took platforming away from the... The Donkey Kong kang kangaroo single-screen concept and turned it into this adventure where you were going left-to-right and the screen scrolled with you. But it's, very primitive. Like you have

like asteroids controls left and right two buttons instead of a joystick. They got rid of the joystick. Yeah, it was so weird.

So bewildering. And the design of the game was based very strongly on the cartoon which is interesting because the cartoon was created in America

by Hannah Barbera. It was not an anime. But they based Pac-Man's design, the ghosts. I think you, at the end, you have to face off

or whatever, defeat, Mesmeron, the bad guy from the cartoon I can't remember, I've never beaten the game so I can't say for myself, but I think so. I was a discerning child and I did not like the cartoon. Was there a fairy in the cartoon? Because there's like a fairy. A fairy plays prominently into

Pac-land. I don't think so. I don't remember a fairy. It's like a Namco edition. I remember like the weird how Pac-Man kind of coexisted with the ghosts and then they would decide to destroy him or whatever. So they'd all like flocked to him and go

and then he'd just be like crumpled in a heap on the ground, but not dead or anything. It was really strange. He also sounded like a 65-year-old chronic smoker and like whiskey drinker. God, Pac-Man. He ate everything, cigarettes, whiskey. He's got a problem. What's that called PICA when you just eat like garbage and stuff like that?

It's a condition, I think. Yeah. Actually, I never played Pac-Land in the arcade. The first time I ever played it was Termographic 16. Like, oh, I guess this came out in the arcade. I just never seen it before. Yeah, I came out for a lot of systems. It was on NES, links,

turbographics, probably something else. It's really hard to play. I was watching a video. It's a beautiful game for 1984. Like, it looks better than Super Mario Brothers, I think. Like, the characters look, like, they're from the cartoon,

maybe a little more of a Japanese flair to them, and there's, like, parallax scrolling and stuff like that. It's really interesting. Yeah, I was an early example of parallax scrolling. I think Moon Patrol was the earliest. It actually had sort of plainer scrolling, so at different speed. gave it a real feeling of depth.

Really a horrifically catchy song, too. Was it based on the cartoon? I don't want to... That was the cartoon theme song? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's thank him. Hannah Barbera for one thing they did great. I don't like them.

So, yeah, the more Namco made Pac-Man games, the further away from Pac-Man they got. After that, you had Pac-Manio, which was the kind of weird, isometric attempt to return to the Pac-Man concept, but again you had a scrolling maze in that and it was much more complicated. They changed the visual style

and it just wasn't fun. You had a jump button and then you realize the ghost jump two. Oh, jeez. I'm like, whoa! It's totally revolutionary. Yeah. I never really got the appeal of that game.

I don't know if it had any appeal. I was attracted to it visually, I think, when I first saw it. I'm like, okay, I definitely want to see what this is like. Isn't it like you go through these kind of like Lego mazes? Yeah, yeah. And then it's, even the marquee is like a custom marquee where the Pac-Man is like extruded out.

Yeah, that's right. So I was like really pushing that 3D effect. And then there was Pac-attack, which is kind of a Tetrisy game. I guess that was probably later. Maybe after Pac-Man 2, the new adventures. That's my favorite Pac-Man game. The point you click. It is the weirdest, just the weirdest idea that someone had the guts to make and they brought it here.

And it just, there's nothing else like it. I don't think, a Pac-Man 2. I did an entire retronauts about it about a year ago. Please look that up. I don't want to waste time here talking about it. But it is just a fascinatingly weird and just silly, fun, like, little interactive cartoon. Yeah, that wasn't developed by Namco, was it? But it was published by them.

I think it was developed by Namco. Was it? Yeah, I think it was an internally developed game. So in America, it had the weight of being Pac-Man 2. Yeah. Okay, Pac-and-Time was the one that was produced by someone else. I think people did not like Pac-Man 2 because it was called Pac-Man 2 because it was called Pac-Man 2. because it was called Pac-Man 2 here.

And that is a huge responsibility to be Pac-Man 2. And in Japan, it's called, hello, Pac-Man, because he's this little character that you steer around and stuff. So, again, listen to that Retronaut's Micro. I won't waste time. But it's a weird. I love it. It's so weird.

So, yeah, that was Namco's kind of history for the next 10 years of trying to figure out how to follow up on Pac-Man, generally kind of failing. Namco licensed the game to Midway for American release. They really, you know, license Pac-Man to Midway. And for whatever reason, Midway decided that that was licensed to just do whatever they wanted with Pac-Man. So there's this entire lineage of Pac-Man games that are totally unofficial, totally disavowed by Namco,

have, like, they're never ported or, you know, compiled anywhere. When you get Namco collections, like, they never include the Midway games except Ms. Pac-Man. And that's kind of the weird exception, because the best classic Pac-Man game up until, you know, Pac-Man DX was not made by Namco. It was made kind of as a bootleg hack. And, Jazz, I know you were just at the post-mortem for that at GDC and interviewed Steve. Steve Golson. Steve Golson, yeah. Yeah, it was interesting.

Basically, it was produced by a group of MIT dropouts that were creating, they created a super missile attack, which was a mod board that were very popular sort of around the 1980s to modify arcade games so that, you know, players couldn't play them for hours on end. And so they produced this version of missile command that they sold very well. Atari basically sued them, and the court case dragged on, and in the end, Atari ended up settling with them and said, look, rather than continue this court case, we'll settle with you and give you $50,000 a month to develop two games for us. And one of the things that General Computer Court, the corporation that they created to develop these things, said was that they could continue to make mod boards for arcade. games and Atari said, sure, but only if you get the consent of the manufacturer, which

was a, they didn't think that they would ever be able to do that. Turns out that they had a mod board for Pac-Man that they were working on called Crazy Otto, which was the fundamentals of Miss Pac-Man. And they actually called up NANCO and said, look, you know, we've got this. Namco or Midway? Sorry, Midway. And basically said, look, we've got this thing. this, this mod board in the works.

You know, Atari tried to sue us and ended up losing, so we're going to produce this, but we'd like your consent to create this thing. And I mean, we said, took a couple of looks at it and said, well, actually, this is a really good game, and we want a sequel to Pac-Man. Why don't we kind of create something completely new

rather than Crazy Auto, which is a sort of a hacked version of Pac-Man? So they continued to develop that, created Ms. Pac-Man, which was going to be called Pac-Woman at one point, and Miss Pac-Man, until they realized that one of the cutscenes, incidentally, Pac-Man was one of the first games with the cutscene, actually had Pac-Man and Miss Pac-Man having a baby. So they couldn't call it Miss Pac-Man because, you know, that would be having a baby. Like, M-I-S-S-Pack-Man? Yeah, M-I-S-Pack-Man, yeah. So they changed it to Ms. Pac-Man. It was very women's lib. I remember that being a punchline in a sitcom, like, talking about Ms. Pac-Man.

It was like, you know, ERA kind of was still in the zeitgeist back then. And so that was kind of seen as like, you're not Miss Pac-Man, you're not Mrs. Pac-Man, you're Ms. Pac-Man. Yeah, that's a weird artifact of, like, history. I don't think anyone uses the Ms. prefix anymore. I don't hear it anymore. No, I mean, I definitely don't hear it anymore. And I forgot it was a feminist statement because there was like Ms. Magazine and things like that. It's like you are not defined by if you're single or not, pretty much.

Right. Well, didn't the Pac Woman Sprite actually changed? She had like long hair and like something else. Yes, had long red hair. Right. And it was actually kind of semi-three-dimensional. She had a back that she would turn her back to you as she went up the screen. And as she came down the screen, you'd see the front of the face with sort of this long hair.

And she had little legs like Crazy Otto, basically. looking more like the side of the arcade machine. That's why they added the legs and little arms. But they decided to go with a version of Pac-Man with a bit of bow and a beauty mark. A beauty mark. Well, and she has eyes. Yeah, like that in itself gave her more personality than Pac-Man. Pac-Man literally is a circle missing a triangle of a varying size.

But Ms. Pac-Man has lips, like little dot of red lips. the bow, the eyes where she's just kind of like kind of got that, I don't know, Farah Fawcett and Miss Piggy look. And then a beauty mark on the side of her face, a little mole. I do like that they follow the rules

of cartoon sexual dimorphism. It's like, you are a female if you have a bow and eyelashes and that's it. That's like how we know because there are no genitals on PAC people, people. We've studied this hard.

Well, how do they make Baby Pac-Man? Allegedly. Yes. A stalk bought it. Yes, exactly. According to the cut scene. They met and bumped into each other And a stork

Dropped off a baby Right Oh go ahead Oh there's a It showed up at California stream I think last year There's a I think his name is Brendan Parker

He's the eighth grader Basically started working on A Crazy Auto cabinet Because they had prototype I think Crazy Auto And had side art Sort of knocked up And so he made his own side art

And you know Worked on hacking the ROM And there's like a fully It looks like a dedicated Crazy Auto cabinet It's really cool There are so many clones of Pac-Man

and just like rip-offs. My favorite one is shark jaws, where it's two kinds of rip-offs in one. It's a rip-off of jaws and Pac-Man. And the greatest thing about the cabinet is, shark is in, like, the tiniest, most illegible text you'd ever see in your life, and then it just says, jaw is really big.

So, like, we'll show you, was that Paramount Universal? Universal. Right. They wanted the license, but they couldn't get it, so they sneakily put in the word shark above it. Yeah, well, at least you'd been like the man-eater cabinet that was actually a shark.

Yeah. I like that design. Yeah. So Miss Pac-Man, I personally find to be a better game than Pac-Man. There is the greater variety in the ghost behavior, but also just the maze layout changes. Yeah, there's four mazes. And it's more challenging.

The speed changes more quickly. There's, oh yeah, the fruit, instead of just appearing directly below the ghost box or ghost house or whatever the hell that thing is, the fruit actually bounces around the maze, and so that's more dynamic. like you have to change your route through the maze to get the bonus for that level based on where it's appearing.

And yeah, just some subtle tweaks, but it makes the game really fun. And it's a, you know, there were some speed hacks for the game. If you ever have a chance to play an arcade game where the board's been modded to make Miss Pac-Man a little faster, it's really fun because it's maybe a little easier than the standard game,

but it's exciting. It's like fast-paced and really brisk, quite enjoyable. Like, the color changed also. You still have the black background, but the walls of the mazes were thicker and they were filled in with color, and everything had kind of like a pastel hue to it.

And the pastels changed. There was like peach and blue, and, you know, just kind of cycling through as you go through the levels, and it added more visual variety. It kind of took away from the stark, vivid, like, bam, like shockingly bright, colors of Pac-Man, but, you know, I think the muted look probably tied in with the idea that,

hey, we'd like a Pac-Man that appeals even more to female players. And so, you know, it kind of makes sense. You know, they did the same thing. Atari did the same thing with Centipede, lots of pastel colors. And I know that game is very popular with women, including my mother. That's like the only video game she ever wants to play is Centipede. So, you know, there is something to that. Like, colors appeal to different people. And Ms. Pass Pac-Man is a great game by any standard, but also one that is, you know, potentially more inviting to female players based on just its theme and its presentation. So I think it's understandable that the game really became such a universal, like, fixture of arcades. I mean, when Namco releases, you know, their, like, anniversary cabinets, it's always Gallagher and Ms. Pac-Man.

Those are the two. Like, they don't reissue Pac-Man. They reissue Ms. Pac-Man, which I think there was some bad feelings about Ms. Pac-Man for a while. I don't know if Steve talked about that at his presentation. But for a long time, there were no official Namco-sanctioned reissues of Ms. Pac-Man. And I think, I want to say maybe with Namco Museum for PlayStation, they put Ms. Pac-Man in that collection. Yeah, she's on the cover. I remember her being on the cover.

Yeah, I think she's on volume three. Namco redesign. She looks more like that one. Sure, but I mean, it's the game. Oh, yeah, for sure. And they finally sort of accepted, like, yes, this is a part of Pac-Man canon. And then, you know, the game showed up on Super NES. The Super NES version

actually came after the PlayStation Museum, Namco Museum, releases. But it is now part of the official canonical Pac-Man series, which is more than you can say for any other Midway game. Did you guys ever play any of the other Midway game? Did you guys ever play any of the other midway titles?

Well, Junior Pac-Man was one of them. And I was reading that is one of the two titles that broke the deal. Actually, it is Junior Pac-Man. Yeah. It's not Pac-Man's child. I think it's Pac-Man as a smaller PAC person. Or maybe it's like Carl's Jr. Pac-Man's Jr., yeah.

It is weird. Like, I was as blown away by that as you. I was like, I have to be remembering this incorrectly. But no, it is Junior Pac-Man. So there you go. I see. I think Professor Pac-Man was the other one that was like, this is too much, guys. You can't have this license anything.

Yeah, I think that was where they killed it. Professor Pac-Man was actually produced in extremely small numbers and is an extremely rare game now. I've never seen it now. I saw it at a, you know, the pizza place near my house, like one of the big amusement centers. It wasn't, you know, showbiz. It was some local off-brand. But they had Professor Pac-Man, and I was like, oh, a new Pac-Man game.

And I played it and said, okay. No, never mind. Yeah. So I can at least have claimed to have played Pac-Man, Professor Pac-Man at some point. Yeah, I mean, as an arcade game. collector. So I've had experience with all of the sort of sequels. Professor Pac-Man is extraordinarily rare because it has a weird marquee that kind of is bent at the top and there's a secondary marquee and then the buttons themselves. That wasn't a cabaret cabinet, wasn't it?

No. Actually, they used that cabinet for Pac-Land afterwards, but then they had a metal plate where the marquee had bent before. It has like proprietary buttons, like their big circular buttons were like Pac-Man stenciled on them. And the game's not very good. obviously. It doesn't look very good from what I saw. Yeah, it uses, like, I think the gorf board

or something like that. But then the nightmare for me was a baby Pac-Man. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because basically, you know, it's like, oh, it's a video game and a pin mall machine merged in a one.

And that, there were a few of those around then. Yeah. There was Granny and the Gators. Right. But it's, like, the game itself is based on the Galaxy in hardware, isn't it?

Yeah, and it's, I mean, when you, the boards themselves are, is a pinball board and it's an arcade board and they have to communicate with each other and that breaks all the time and it doesn't boot if they're not communicating with each other and so

I always tell people if you're going to buy a baby Pac-Man buy two because you're going to need one to keep running and then one for like a donor cabinet for parts. That idea worked much better when pinball machines started having little mini games on the LCD like display. That was a much better idea. It wasn't like

here's a TV we'll just smash it on top of this pinball machine. Yeah I mean it's like here's a terrible Pac-Man game and a terrible pinball machine, all in one, right? They're bad. Like, I was talking to Steve as like, I saw this at the Portland Retro Game Expo, and I was like, I never played it, and I played, like, two balls. I'm like, I'm done. Like, it's not even fun for novelty.

Yeah, I remember playing it back when it was a new game and thought the idea was really cool and did not enjoy it at all. So I played it again at Portland last year. Yeah. And it was like, oh, okay, my memories are correct. This is garbage. This is terrible. There was one other game we forgot to mention, though, which was actually the first follow

up to Ms. Pac-Man, which was New Exciting Pac-Man Plus, which was basically just Pac-Man except with Coke cans? It was, no, it was kind of like a weird troll Pac-Man ROM. It's what it felt like, because like, when you'd grab the power pellet, not every ghost would turn

blue. They have like a flag or something, and they'd run away. And then other times, you grab another energizer, and then the ghost would be invisible. Or it was weird stuff like that. And it was like, okay. It's like almost like a puzzle game. or something.

Yeah, I admit I haven't played that one since it was in the arcades. They had it at my local putt, putt, I think, and I played it at someone's birthday party. But I, you know, it was like super Pac-Man to me. I was just like,

this isn't what I want from a Pac-Man sequel. Where's, like, real Pac-Man? We never really got that again. It took until, you know, what was it, 2007 with Pac-Man DX? Championship Edition D-X, yeah. Yeah, they really hit it out of the park. 25 years, more than 25 years

to get a really good Pac-Man follow-up to his Pac-Man. The Toro Yotani had nothing to do with all of these weird deviations, right? Like, I feel like he was, wasn't he not getting, I mean, there were no royalties back then,

and he was just, like, making his salary. He didn't get anything for Pac-Man. Didn't he leave the company or something at some point? Probably. I just remember there was a story about him being, like, disgruntled, because I've read that he wasn't disgruntled, He was just like, yeah, that's just how it is.

You know, that's how the business was. Like, he didn't feel a sense of entitlement to the fruits of his genius. That's too bad, because I think you should be a cabillionaire. Well, I think, you know, they kind of repatriated him. And he was brought into help out with Pac-Man Champion Edition. And he's had a hand in a lot of Pac-Man games since then, or several. Pac-Man's kind of gone in some weird ideas. There's, you know, like, there's your obligatory sort of match three.

free-to-play iOS game. I can't even remember what that's called. Oh, they did almost everything. I mean, Navvrolet Pac-Man on every kind of, like, mobile game. I do say, I have to say, pack and jump is really fun. I haven't even played that way. It's a little jump? Yeah, it's just, like, dooddle-down.

I mean, if there's a popular iOS game, there is a Pac-Man version of it on the store. Did you guys ever play Pac-Picks for DS? It was an early DS game? No. That sounds familiar. It was really cool. It was basically the series of little almost like puzzleish levels and you had to draw Pac-Man and draw different things

with the stylus on the bottom screen of the game. It's been a long time since I've played it, but it was really, it was very unusual. You could draw like really horrible-looking misshapen Pac-Men and they would flop around. Big for death. Like it would kind of recognize like, oh, here's the mouth of Pac-Man. So, yeah, it was basically like grumblefly, Pac-Man.

I did want to mention Pac-Man versus. Like, everyone, when that was revealed at E3, granted, it was not the huge announcement we wanted. But everyone treated it like, oh, this is Miyamoto's Folly. This is the step down for Nintendo. But my friends and I played the hell out of that. And then they made it into an arcade game, which is a little different, but I have so much fun with that arcade game, too. Like, that's a great idea. That's a great idea that was just at the wrong time.

The technology to make it fun wasn't there yet. You had to do all the, you know, each person had to have a GBA. Each person had to have a link cable. I'll agree that was conversome. Like, it needed, like if they had waited until Wi-Fi. And actually, they did, they put it in. There's a, it's like, it's like smuggled into some collection on the GameCube, I think. No, it's, it's, oh, really?

I think, I want to say it's on DS and something or another. I can't remember what, there's a Namco Museum in, on DS, right? I think it's part of the DS Namco Museum. Where they kind of remade some of the games. Yeah, I'm. I'm positive that right, but that's right. But I didn't think to look that up before this. In any case, I think that should be on the 3DSE shop, like, for five bucks.

I would play that with everybody. Yeah, like, Four Swords became much more fun when you didn't have to, you know, just played on DSI wirelessly with people. But with Four Swords, Nintendo's like, it's free for three months and then get out of here. It's like, why can't it just be free forever? What are we doing? Like, or at least sell it, yeah, whatever. So, in your opinion, what is the best follow-up to Pac-Man?

What is the best sequel? Steve? I mean, that's Miss Pac-Man, right? I think, for me, it's the one I still play. Like I said, I've had multiple cabinets, and it's the thing that whenever... People walk in to went ahead an arcade set up. People would just run to it, right? There's tons of other games, tons of other pinball,

but everybody's like, it's Ms. Bashman! And everybody sits down at the cocktail and has stories for it. Jazz, what do you think? I think we had to wait 27 years for Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. I really loved that. I played it to death. I mean, the sort of the little many challenges and everything just made that game so very moorish.

And it really was kind of true to the Pac-Man. canon, so to speak, and didn't mess with the gameplay too much at all. Yeah, I'm with jazz. I thought this is going to be sacrilege, but I feel like that gave me the kind of safety cushion I needed to make Pac-Man more fun. And it's also, like I mentioned before, you can, like, sort of like Mario Kart drift around corners to, you know, speed up when ghosts are chasing you. And there's this, like, bayonetto witch-time thing.

When a ghost is about to get you, the time slows down, you can kind of spin around. Just like a Middle Gear Solid 5. Yes. And you can also drop bombs, too, to destroy all the ghosts. I mean, they did not, they took this basic idea. They didn't add too many things to it, but they added enough to it to make it a modern, fun experience for people. And I love that game.

I'm going to go with Ms. Pac-Man. So I guess the lines are drawn here. Yes. Steve and I are on Team Miss Pac-Man. You guys can be on Team Championship Edition. I do have the CEDX soundtrack that's in my car. Oh, that's really great, yeah. One of those songs, like, it's a techno beat.

That seems dangerous to drive to. It does. It feels like you're playing Ridge Racer. When you're driving your car, this is really dangerous. Okay, so what do you think is the worst Pac-Man game, Steve? Professor Pac-Man. I mean, the game is barely a Pac-Man game.

I mean, if you want to look at the sort of official ones, I'd probably see Super Pac-Man because it was just incomprehensible to start. I would say Baby Pac-Man, because I would never want to play Professor Pac-Man, but the idea of a Pac-Man pinball slash arcade game is so cool, and they just peed it down their leg, the idea. Like, I can't believe how bad it is. I can't believe that was manufactured. Jazz, what do you think?

Oh, dear. I mean, you've definitely got some choice here. I mean, I think I'd have to go with Professor Pac-Man. It just wasn't particularly fun, and it was a nice idea, but it was executed in such a horrible way that it just did not work for me. Okay. Well, I'm with Bob on this, and I definitely have to say Baby Pac-Man. But we can all agree that Midway just, you know,

They just crept the bed. They did a terrible job of... After General Computing gave them a masterpiece, everything they did afterwards was just like an embarrassment. Yeah, just almost like they didn't have any designers there that were really fundamentally understood what made the appeal of Pac-Man, and they just sort of tried to sort of throw stuff against the wall

and hoped that something stuck, and it just didn't really. Yeah. Well, it's funny, you know, one of the gauges I use is collectibility, right? if you, especially in the arcade scene, everybody wants to have, oh, I want to have, like, all the different Pac-Man machines, but there's really not that demand. People are, like, you know, twist my arm. Oh, my God, I got to spend, like, $2,000 to get a professor pack that just, there's no way I would do that.

But, you know, other games, you know, other the GCC totals, like quantum and everything else, people are really interested in. So, yeah, it's like, even the collector scene, it's more of a begrudging, like, okay, maybe, but no. Yeah, every collector scene kind of has that, you know, like, people. people who are like, oh, I guess I have to spend this money on Panic Restaurant for NES or, you know, the Flintstones. That's a good game, though. Panic restaurants is good. Hidden people with bread.

That's great. That's a Kenji Eno. Is it? Am I thinking of the right game? I don't know. I don't think you are. Okay, well, the Flintstone's surprise the Dinosaur Peak is definitely a begrudging choice. Like $2,000 for that.

That is a surprise. No, thanks. They were kidding. Mariette's 6 and 1. Keep like that. Yeah. That's easy to ignore the unofficial loans, though. Yeah, it's true.

But that panic restaurant, Box art is hideous, and I would think it was a bad game if I saw that box art, the American box art. In your opinion, what is the most memorable Pac-Man clone? And you can use a pretty liberal interpretation of clone. Like, everyone was ripping off Pac-Man back then. You had, you know, pretty direct inspirations like ADKs or Alpha Denshi's Crush Roller, aka Make Tracks. And, you know, even Nintendo was in on the business with, like, Clu-Cloo Land and Devil World.

Like, those were very clearly inspired by Pac-Man. So looking at those, what do you think was the most, not necessarily the best, but the one you remember the most? Well, for me, it's Casey Munchkin. And it's because they're at O'Neils, which is kind of like Macy's. They had an Odyssey 2 set up, and that was the game that was always playing. I'm like, this is close enough to Pac-Man where I can play this. And when I think of Pac-Man clones, that's the first thing that comes to mind.

And that and I have, you know, afterwards a lot of the sort of legal documents. from those lawsuits and things like that. So it's ultra fascinating for me. I didn't actually, I've never really played any Pac-Man clones. I just played the real thing. So I'm going to have to say my choice is the clone. It's called, oh, shit. Just because it's a game called Oh, shit.

And you're like, what is this game? But it's just a Pac-Man clone. So I think the, oh, shit, was like, we're going to get sued. I remember playing Clucluland and thinking it was pretty cool. It was different enough that it kind of wasn't quite a Pac-Man clone. And there were plenty of, I can't remember their names because they're also obscure on the kind of ZX spectrum and the Commodore 64 and those early British computers and that were very popular at that point. But, yeah, Cluclalan was pretty cool. I really want to like CluClu Land.

Like, the idea's fun and interesting, but the control scheme is really hard for me to wrap my head around. You need to play CluCooland D. It's the same. I'm just kidding. It has a giant sea urchin. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it does take a while to wrap your brain around. I played a lot of it when it was free with Animal Crossing.

Like, I kind of wrapped my brain around it and managed to do okay. Yeah, I've been trying to capture footage for it for good intentions, and I'm just like, my footage sucks so badly. It took me a while to realize, oh, I can shoot that little laser beam. Oh, right, yeah. The radar beam at people. That's how you squish dudes. Yeah, that helped.

But even so, it's still really tough because the control is relative to your character rather than based, you know, absolutely on the screen. So it's kind of like Resident Evil tank controls. Yeah. a maze game and it's really fast-paced. So you really have to be quick and nimble and really get the control scheme. And the things you're quote-unquote picking up are invisible. Like you have to figure out what do I go between. Yeah. Yeah. So there are certain patterns and designs that appear and you start to recognize them after a while. But then you have stuff like the whirlpools in the middle of

the screen where stuff comes out and you have to avoid falling into it. But you can swing over it. As long as you're holding onto a pole, you can swing over the whirlpools. So it's, it's kind of got a lot of subtle sophistication to it. It's just, the control scheme is really tough for me. I think it would work better if you pressed like A and B to grab with your left and right hands as opposed to whatever the setup is. It's just a, it's baffling. Yeah, for me, my most memorable clone was also Casey Munchkin, just because it was

a really well done. It was on, what, Odyssey 2? Yep, Odyssey 2. Yeah, it was a good Pac-Man clone. You know, at the time I had seen... I had seen Pac-Man on 2,600, and even though I was, like, seven or eight years old, I still, like, said, this isn't right. This is, what is this?

This is not what I want. I desperately wanted a 2600. I desperately wanted Pac-Man, and I played it at a friend's house and was like, this should be more awesome than it is. What's happening? But then I went to another friend's house and played Casey Munchkin. It was like, okay, yeah. It kind of reminded me actually a little bit of Epic Man, honestly, the handheld that I had.

It had kind of the same vibe to it and felt. similar, but I liked it, yeah. And of course, you know, there is the history behind it, which you know a lot better than I do, clearly if you have the court documents for it. Whereas I just kind of remember it as like this cool thing that a friend had and I never saw again. So it's always just kind of stuck in my mind. Anyway, yeah, so Pac-Man had a pretty big footprint, like a pop culture footprint and a pretty big impact on video gaming. So my final question before we wrap this episode is, what do you think is Pac-Man's legacy? I'll start with you.

Wow, that's, what is his legacy? I mean, ultimately, it's any kind of maze game. You know, you totally associate with it, even though Rele X was sort of the first. I think Pac-Man established non-violent, sort of interesting maze game play that really did open up, I think, the eyes to designers

that gaming didn't have to just be about shooting. Bob? I think this wasn't an inevitability. Someone else probably would have done it, but I think Pac-Man was important because it was about a character and not just an idea.

And I don't think that was as common in 1981 as it is today. Just like, here's a character, you're this character, he's got a life outside the game, probably. There are cut scenes. So yeah, I think having like a cartoon-y character

was a very important step for video games to make. Yeah, I think for me it's the market expansion. You know, it's kind of geared towards women, or at least that's one of the principles behind its design, and it really did pull more people in the arcades, right? Like pinball, maybe it was like the smoky, kind of sketchy place, but then you had, you know, women, families kind of coming in to play games, and it, you know, was one of those touchstones that really kind of everybody started realizing,

okay, video games are a thing, and that's the reason it's in the Smithsonian and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, things like that. It's an iconic, sort of, it's an iconic brand, I guess. Yeah, I guess my thoughts are something along those lines. This was the point at which video games became mainstream and became something that became more than a novelty as opposed, you know, in the 70s and early 80s, I always got the impression that it was kind of like this,

you know, very fattish. And the 70s seemed to be a time of a lot of fads between disco and pet rocks and roller skating and all that kind of stuff. Video games could have been just like that. But because of the market expansion, because of the appeal of Pac-Man, I mean, I guess Pac-Man could have been

just like the ultimate version of that fad, but it really had lasting power and it really became something that people could relate to. I think, you know, really for the reasons everyone talked about, about, like, you know, because of the character of it and so forth. So it really was, I think, in a way, sort of the point at which video games became established.

And, of course, you know, Atari did its level best to destroy that a couple of years later, but the medium survived anyway. And, you know, Pac-Man is still something that people remember even though there were, you know, there were like two good Pac-Man games in the early 80s and then a lot of garbage with Pac-Man's name on it. people still have a fond

memory of Pac-Man. People know Pac-Man. People still kind of touch on that. You know, older people as like the cliché, that's what they know about video games is Pac-Man. And it was everywhere. So, yeah, pretty important, in my opinion. So any final thoughts?

He was video gaming's first hero, really. I mean, I think we could talk about him being a character, but he was an actual hero. You know, it's something that you could identify with somebody that was fighting for something that didn't involve shooting invaders, and he wasn't saving the world necessarily, but he was

being chased down by these ghosts and I think there's sort of an interesting metaphor there for life of having to battle your way through and sort of, you know, sort of essentially trying to clear a path for yourself. And, you know, it was just something that seemed to resonate

with people at the time. And, you know, video gaming needed a hero at that point. There wasn't anything. Video gamers were becoming a really big thing. And I, as Steve said, you know, it really brought droves into the arcades, people kind of coming to see what the fuss was all about that weren't necessarily interested in playing the likes of asteroids and missile command and Galaxians,

but were keen to try out this new thing that just sounded really cool. For my final thought, I will offer an endorsement to download Pac-Man 2, The New Adventures, on WiiU. It's inexplicably available to buy. I don't know why, but just give money to it. And it's nothing like Pac-Man. I'll totally admit it's nothing like Pac-Man, but you can't unlock Pac-Man in the game. So that's my endorsement. Please buy it.

It's a really neat, fun thing. That's nothing like Pac-Man, but it's a fun use of the character, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, it's just, you know, my own personal connection to the game. Like, whenever I load up or, you know, start Miss Pac-Man, I can see my dad kind of sitting across from me at that cocktail cabinet. And I think it was nice that it brought families, you know, everybody could play it. And it was just, it was an amazing feeling for me. All right.

Thanks, everyone. Well, I guess that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts. We've actually talked quite a bit about Pac-Man. So hopefully we've done justice to the legacy. So, of course, Retronauts is always at Retronauts.com. U.Sgamer.net and on iTunes. So check us out, listen to other episodes if you enjoyed this one. Even if you hated this one,

you should listen to other episodes because maybe you'll find one that you like. Everyone, tell us where we can find you on the internet. Jazz. I'm Jazz Wignall, and you can find my work at usgamer.net and also follow me on that jazz Rignell with 1Z, R-I-G-N-A-L, on Twitter.

Bob. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo. I also write for something awful, and USGamer. And I have another podcast. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. It's called Talking Simpsons, and it's on Lasertime Podcast.com or just surf for Talking Simpsons in your podcast device. And Steve Lynn, I'm Stephen P. Lin on Twitter.

Follow me if you want to get pictures of old video game t-shirts and legal documents. Who doesn't? And you can find me writing at usgamer.net and gameboy.world. And you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. and YouTube is Toasty Frog, but that's all stuff that goes for Game Boy World. So whatever, it's all the same. Anyway, thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a short episode, two weeks, with a big episode.

In the meantime, you can support us by going to patreon.com slash returnauts. Give us money because we like money, and it's expensive to make these podcasts. It may not sound like it, but my God, it's such a money-losing endeavor. So please help us out. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon. Thanks. Thank you.

Thank you.