It’s been ages since I’ve written a retro games review. So here, have two at once, starring gaming’s first couple: Pac-Man and Ms Pac-Man.
Long before Mario was chasing Daisy (or Peach — he gets about a bit, that lad), the Pacs were engaged in gaming’s first tryst, all while chasing (or being chased) by ghosts through mazes.
It’s probably some kind of deep metaphor about the futility of life, or, as so many wits have put it, why so many kids of that era grew up popping pills and listening to electronic music in darkened rooms*
Which was all fine and good when it came to the arcade, but when it came time for Atari, which was at that time a juggernaut of immense proportions, as distinct from the IP Lawyer types that now infest that name.
Because what happened was the creation of two very different games. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently playing the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, something I wrote about recently over on Kotaku Australia.
The 2600 version of Pac-Man works quite nicely as a while-I’m-waiting-on-hold phone game, because it’s Pac-Man boiled down to its absolute essence. Pac and the ghosts are all very basic and blocky, because this is, after all, running on the finest technology money could buy all the way back in 1981.
God, but I’m old. The one thing that actually depresses me about retro gaming, stupid rising prices and annoying “collectors” notwithstanding, is seeing copyright dates on games.
There’s something relatively meditative about Pac-Man on the 2600, because the genuine urgency of the arcade version is all but absent in the base game. Being a 2600 title, you can muck around with selection switches to change up either your speed or the speed of your foes, as well as the specific difficulty, but this is still a relatively sedate title with just a single maze to contend with.
It also amusingly tries to cram a plot into Pac-Man. Yeah, a plot. You didn’t know it needed one, right? Well, according to the manual,
“The object of the game is to keep PAC-MAN happy and healthy in his home of Mazeland. PAC-MAN starts the game with four lives(turns). The longer he survives, the more points you score. You score a point for every video wafer that PAC-MAN eats. You also score points when PAC-MAN eats power pills, vitamins, and ghosts. Everytime PAC-MAN eats all of the video wafers on the maze, he earns an extra life and a new maze full of video wafers.”
(text via Atari Age, because I only have a loose cart version, sadly.)
Mazeland? A Pac-Man with nutritional needs? Why do I get the feeling that the manual writers were being forced at this stage into some kind of kid-friendly-let’s-not-focus-on-the-pill-popping-aspect-of-things scheme?
Still, it’s amusing, and amusing is always a plus for simple games.
Which is all well and good, but even now, some (gulp) 34 years later, it’s not hard to see why the gamers of 1981 were more than a little ticked off with the 2600 version of Pac-Man, because while it’s got the ostensible parts present, they don’t really fit together in a way that feels like Pac-Man. You’re a blocky Pac, but the colours of the ghosts only have the mildest variance, with ugly flicker when you’ve eaten a power pellet.
The “vitamins” in the centre of the screen are nearly as big as you are, which leaves me wondering how Pac actually manages to eat them. The ghosts are remarkably dumb, which means it’s not very hard unless you limit your speed deliberately via the difficulty switches.
If anything, it feels like the kind of Pac-Man game that might have been being sold as a cheap knock-off of what Pac-Man should be.
Which is why I turned from Pac-Man to his female counterpart, 1982’s Ms Pac-Man.
It might sound just a tad hyperbolic, but the difference between the two is genuinely mindblowing. Where Pac-Man feels like a pale imitiation, Ms Pac-Man takes the limitations of the Atari 2600’s hardware and throws everything possible at it. The ghosts are distinct, from AI to movement speed.
You get multiple mazes, moving fruit that looks like fruit and the genuine satisfaction of pulling off a tricky move, rather than the more sedate pace of Pac-Man itself. It’s not quite the arcade game, but it’s challenging and intense, which is quite the feat for a game that fits into 8kb of code.
You know those legal notices that appear at the start of any game you play these days detailing the engines used, licences paid for or development studios involved?
The full stop at the end doesn’t fit into 8kb. Not even close. And you skip past it, impatient to get to something you can actually play.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Ms. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 might just be the most entertaining 8kb of code ever. I’m struggling to think of a 2600 title that so simply compares.
Being a licence of an existing arcade title, there’s no collections of games that include Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man to note, which means that if you want legit, you’re going to have to buy actual cartridges.
Atari 2600 carts, especially if you want boxes, aren’t all that cheap, which makes a certain amount of sense given that they’re 30+ years old now; I’m vaguely interested in getting a boxed Pac-Man to go along with my loose cart copy, and they seem to sell for around $10-$20 or so. Ms Pac-Man is similar, with loose carts for either typically going for around five bucks.
So would I buy both if I had neither? Pac-Man is interesting as a historical curio, because it’s one of the first “big” games that Atari dropped the ball on in terms of providing a quality conversion. Space Invaders came out before it, but it’s a great conversion.
But if I was buying one, it’s Ms. Pac-Man I’d buy. Not just because I’m an (uncrowned) world champion at it, although clearly that is worth bringing up whenever I can get away with it. Even with the limits of the 2600’s hardware, it’s still a instantly playable, horribly addictive classic.
*Allegedly.