2nd Generation - Pac-Man

Pac-Man was released in 1980 by Namco as an arcade game, and it was originally called Puck Man. The character of Pac-Man was an idea of Toru Iwatani, who focused on designing this game to attract more women to the game industry. Pac-Man became the first iconic character of the video game industry.

The power pills shown in the game introduced the first prey-to-predator mechanic in video games. The game was a success and it also kicked off a wide variety of merchandise, like an animated television series, lunch boxes and t-shirts. It also spawned many sequels, such as Super Pac-Man.

In 1982, Atari Inc. designed this game for their home video game console, the Atari 2600. The player would use a joystick to move the character around the screen. the goal of the game was to eat all the food on screen while avoiding four ghosts that would lose you lives if you made contact with them. Some differences from the original arcade game are the maze pattern, and the items in the game, like the wafers and vitamins.

Figure 1 - Pac-Man gameplay

When the arcade game Pac-Man was ported onto the console it lost some of its qualities due to the hardware limitations of the Atari 2600. Programming was handled by Tod Frye. The screen resolution was lower after the game was ported on the Atari console and fewer colors than the arcade game were shown on screen and sometimes the ghosts gave a flickering effect or did not appear on screen at all, since the Atari 2600 could not handle the characters on the screen in real time with its hardware. The game used a 4KB ROM cartridge, while the arcade game stored four times as much ROM, and the Zilog Z80 CPU it used was three times faster than the processor used by the Atari console.         

Many players returned their copy of the game due to the low quality it had. this was one of the main causes of the North American video game crash that took place in 1983, since the production of Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 made the customers lose confidence in the company. 

In1982, Pac-Man was modified in order to be ported to the new version of the Atari console, the Atari 5200. This new version of the game made it look more realistic and it was more similar to the original arcade game than any other version on console released before. It was followed by Pac-Man’s sequels, such as Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man, for the Atari 2600. Both these games made a better impact than Atari’s first Pac-Man title. For instance, Ms. Pac-Man features a larger Rom cartridge.

Several copies of the game were designed in order to improve it. In December 1987, Mindscape’s IBM PC version of Pac-Man sold over 100,000 copies. The game was also released for Atari’s 8-bit computers, Intellivision, the Commodore 64 and VIC-20, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was also released on handheld game consoles like Game Boy, Sega Game Gear, and the Neo Geo Pocket Color. The gameplay of Pac-Man was so popular, that remakes of the game are still being made today.

Bibliography:

Wikipedia.org, (2015). Pac-Man. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man [Accessed 6 March 2015]

Wikipedia.org, (2014). Pac-Man (Atari 2600). [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600) [Accessed 6 March 2015]

Gamefaqs.com, (2015). Pac-Man. [online] Available at: http://www.gamefaqs.com/atari2600/584949-pac-man/trivia [Accessed 6 March 2015]