Pac-Man, the little yellow round
ball with the big mouth, is turning 20.
Send bright dots and fruit and
a power pellet or two.
To celebrate the anniversary,
the Japan-based company Namco Hometek has turned loose "Pac Man World."
More than two years in the making, the new home video game for Sony's PlayStation
takes Pac-Man out of his traditional maze and into a 3-D world. This
Pac-Man has a face, arms and legs, and can run, jump, shoot, climb, swim
and "butt-bounce," all the better to save his friends and family from a
new villain, Toc-Man.
The new game also can be played
in two other formats to suit traditional tastes. One has the game's
bad guys, the tireless ghosts Binky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde, chasing Pac-Man
around a maze that, with new technology, is 3-D. The other looks
and plays just like the original.
"In the past we hid an arcade
version of Pac-Man in some of our Genesis and Super Nintendo game codes,
and we still get calls every single day asking how to open up the secret
mode and play (Pac-Man)," said Mike Fischer, marketing director at Namco
Hometek. "This time we decided to give true Pac-Man fans the original
classic right up front."
Pac-Man wasn't the first video
game, but "he was the world's first video game character," in Fischer's
opinion. "Even though he was just a little puck going 'waka waka
waka,' he was imbued with a personality and people could relate to him."
Indeed Pac-Man stood out from
other early '80s games such as "Space Invaders," "Asteroids," "Missile
Command," "Sinistar," "Defender" and "Astro Fighter." You didn't
just zap something and see it disappear with a metallic-sounding fizz;
you were the Pac-Man, and you ran around a maze filled with dots of light
and two servings of fruit. If one of four ghosts caught you before
you ate all the dots, that would be the end of you.
Adults, teens, kids, even the
hard-to-reach female audience took to it. Games found their way into
restaurants fast-food joints across the country.
It all helped Pac-Man and it's
spinoff, Ms. Pac-Man, stick around the longest, make the most money and
leave the biggest impact on a still-young gaming industry. Consider:
•Pac-Man has swallowed more than $1 billion in quarters,
which means it has been played more than 10 million times.
•The Pac-Man image has been licensed for 430 products,
including toilet seats and a hot rod.
•The name has been co-opted by big business (the "Pac-Man
Defense" is when a company tries to swallow up another company attempting
a hostile take-over) and boating industry (a 1999 model boat with a big
mough that opens and closes has been named the pac-man).
•People still play it. In July Florida resident
Billy Mitchell achieved what is thought to be the first perfect score on
a Pac-Man. Mitchell guided on Pac-Man through 256 boards and grabbed
every fruit and ghost for a total of 3,333,360 points. It took his
six hours.
•There are entire Webrings of players devoted to the
game. One site, The First Church of Pac-Man at www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/8112/pac.htm,
has had 60,000 hits in its two years on line. Tim Crist, 24, of Liverpool,N.Y.,
said he started playing it around age 5 in the early '80s. He remembers
why it appealed to him:
"In a game market saturated
with spaceship shoo-'em'up games, this was a nonviolent eating game with
a strange-looking character whose only weapon was his appetite," Crist
said.
Some people spent time considering
Pac-Man's metaphorical meaning. In May of 1982, Ellen Goodman of
the Bostom Glove wrote about wanting to "save her man" from tormenting
ghosts.
"Maybe it was his cute round
shape. . . his oral fixation . . . maybe it was because he seemed so easy
to manipulate."
But she concluded that
"he had all the fatal charm, the promising allure of a sadistic lover.
He was like all the tree-dimensional people you know who lead their lives
by microchip. They're programmed to get you in the end."
