Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Games: Pac-Man

If you're old enough to remember when video games first started showing up in arcades alongside pinball machines I have a question. What original arcade game was the one you first played over and over?

Space Invaders? Q-Bert? Galaga? Or maybe one of the first huge hits - Pac-Man?

Recently a Dutch blog post made the rounds. Toru Iwatani was visiting the Netherlands for the NLGD Festival of Games and he brought with him some rather historic documents. His original design documents and ideas for Pac-Man.

Which got me thinking about Pac-Man. The game has more depth than you think. It may seem as simple as a face running around a maze after dots while ghosts just blindly chase the player but it isn't. There is much more to Pac-Man than that. Don't believe me? Take a look at The Pac-Man Dossier by Jamey Pittman. It's truly the most comprehensive exploration of Pac-Man I've ever seen.

If you ever stumble across an original Pac-Man game and get a chance to put in a few quarters just remember it's deeper and more complicated than you ever thought.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

For me it was a race game "Night Driver" I can't imagine how many quarters I fed that game. The score counter went as high as 999, I managed to roll it twice. Best score was 1011. I was also a big Tron player.