Difference between revisions of "Pac-Man"
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Pac-Man - ARC - USA.jpg|The North American cabinet is a more interesting yellow, but while the ghost is pretty good, the cartoon Pac-Man is completely wrong. And the red eyes don't help much either! | Pac-Man - ARC - USA.jpg|The North American cabinet is a more interesting yellow, but while the ghost is pretty good, the cartoon Pac-Man is completely wrong. And the red eyes don't help much either! | ||
Pac-Man - ARC - USA - Marquee.svg|The North American arcade marquee features the same creepy Pac-Man as the cabinet. | Pac-Man - ARC - USA - Marquee.svg|The North American arcade marquee features the same creepy Pac-Man as the cabinet. | ||
+ | Pac-Man - ARC - USA - Side Art.svg|North American side art. | ||
</gallery> | </gallery> | ||
Revision as of 10:02, 2 September 2020
Pac-Man is a maze traversal game developed and published by Namco on 1980-05-22, and distributed by Midway in the USA in 1980-10-26. This is the first game in the Pac-Man series. The game currently holds the record for the best-selling arcade cabinet, and the second most profitable. Despite being so lucrative, the game's designer Toru Iwatani did not receive a bonus or even official recognition from Namco for his creation.
Contents
Personal
I remember first playing this game in the mid-1980s. I was with my mother and brother, I think at a laundromat in Pontiac. I remember my brother playing and getting to the second stage, but I, being 3-years-younger, couldn't get past the first. I've since watched people who are really good play Pac-Man in arcades, but I've never had much of a desire to get good myself. The game is just too primitive to keep my interest.
Status
I do not own the game. I've never tried hard to get a decent score, and I've never even come close to the kill screen.
Review
4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 |
Best Version: Arcade
— This section contains spoilers! —
Good
- The game is pretty solid. It remains challenging and fast-moving the entire time you play.
- The increasingly difficult ghosts and shorter-length power pellets increase the challenge of the game at a nice steady rate.
- Adding a different "personality" to each ghost was a wonderful idea and really adds to the challenge, as did having the ghosts systematically move toward their own corners.
- Changing the bonus fruit is a nice change of pace.
- The cut-scenes between levels was a nice break in the action.
- The game has some pretty memorable sound effects and jingles.
Bad
- The game is too hard. Most players are unable to beat the first level on their first attempt, which is a bit frustrating.
- Overall, there isn't much to do with the game. You're essentially repeating the same actions the entire game.
- Since the game's pseudo-randomizer is based on past performance, players can game how it functions and just repeat the exact same movements over an over again to beat the game. In fact, this is precisely how professional players play the game and it's incredibly boring to watch.
- The game lacks a true victory condition. Sure, the kill screen ends the game, but it's insanely difficult to reach, and wasn't even intended in the first place.
- There is a minor bug with collision detection where you can sometimes pass right through a ghost.
Ugly
- There isn't much to the game. Sure, it's from 1980, and you can't expect much, but it's extremely repetitive and not very rewarding to play.
Media
Box Art
Documentation
- Pac-Man - ARC - Manual.pdf
Arcade manual.
- Pac-Man - Arcade Instruction Card.png
The Japanese instruction card.
- Pac-Man - ARC - Ad.jpg
Arcade ad.
- Pac-Man - 5200 - Manual.pdf
Atari 5200 manual.
- Pac-Man - C64 - Manual.pdf
Commodore 64 manual.
- Pac-Man - GB - Manual.pdf
Game Boy manual.
- Pac-Man - NES - Manual.pdf
NES manual.
- Namco - Flyer - Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Rally-X.jpg
Namco ad.
Screenshots
Design Documents
- Pac Man - ARC - Design Document - Toru Iwatani.jpg
Toru Iwatani showing off his original design documents.
- Pac Man - ARC - Design Document - Labyrinth.jpg
The labyrinth layout.
- Pac Man - ARC - Design Document - Pac-Man Sprite.jpg
The Pac-Man sprite.
- Pac Man - ARC - Design Document - Sprites.jpg
Various game sprites.
- Pac Man - ARC - Design Document - Ghost Behavior.jpg
Ghost movement behavior.
Graphics
Fan Art
Safely Endangered comic.
Videos
- gdcvault.com/play/1014631/Classic-Game-Postmortem-PAC - Postmortem.
Credits
Although Pac-Man doesn't feature credits, fans of the game have discovered the majority of the design staff.
Person | Staff |
---|---|
Toru Iwatani | Game Designer |
Shigeichi Ishimura | Hardware Designer, Audio Designer |
Shigeo Funaki | Programmer |
Toshio Kai | Sound Composer |
Color Palette
The original arcade version of Pac-Man uses a hardware-based color PROM to determine its colors. The PROM stores a palette of 256 colors in a single byte. The red, green, and blue channels are defined by the bit pattern BBGGGRRR which allows for eight levels of intensity for red and green and four levels for blue. The display hardware could only work with an index of 16 colors chosen from the palette of 256, and even then, each background tile or sprite could only be composed of up to four colors from the index of 16. Despite having 16 possible colors to work with, the designers occupied four slots with black, resulting in only 13 unique colors. These blacks appear to be used in certain graphics to color things invisible. For example, when a pellets is eaten, the game continues to draw it, but it sets its color to black. Also, the area inside the maze walls is colored a different black than the background, although this never comes up in the game as far as I know.
In the table below I've converted the colors from the game into RBG equivalents using an increment of 36 for the red and green channels and an increment of 85 for the blue channel. As far as I know, this does not properly emulate the color PROM's method, and I'm not able to get the true binary value for each color, but it yields a fairly accurate result. More advanced emulators, like MAME probably emulate the PROM, but they also adjust each pixel based on its nearby pixels to better emulate CRTs, so they don't give a true result either.
Index | Swatch | Color | Converted RGB | Binary / Hex / Decimal | Uses |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
0 | Black | 0, 0, 0 | 00000000 0x00 0 | Background | |
1 | Red | 252, 0, 0 | 00000111 0x07 7 | Blinky, cherry, strawberry, apple, Galaxian ship | |
2 | Tan | 216, 144, 85 | 01100110 0x66 102 | Orange top, cherry stem | |
3 | Pink | 252, 180, 255 | 11101111 0xEF 239 | Pinky, ghost house door | |
4 | Black | 0, 0, 0 | 00000000 0x00 0 | Background | |
5 | Cyan | 0, 252, 255 | 11111000 0xF8 248 | Inky, player text | |
6 | Light Blue | 72, 180, 255 | 11101010 0xEA 234 | Key top, bell bottom | |
7 | Orange | 252, 180, 85 | 01101111 0x6F 111 | Clyde, orange | |
8 | Black | 0, 0, 0 | 00000000 0x00 0 | Background | |
9 | Yellow | 252, 252, 0 | 00111111 0x3F 63 | Pac-Man, ready!, bell, Galaxian ship | |
A | Black | 0, 0, 0 | 00000000 0x00 0 | Background | |
B | Blue | 36, 36, 255 | 11001001 0xC9 192 | Maze walls, flashing ghosts, ghost pupils, Galaxian ship | |
C | Green | 0, 252, 0 | 00111000 0x38 56 | Melon, strawberry top, orange leaf | |
D | Teal | 72, 180, 170 | 10101010 0xAA 170 | Melon wrinkles and stem | |
E | Salmon | 252, 180, 170 | 10101111 0xAF 175 | Dots, ghost body | |
F | White | 252, 252, 255 | 11111111 0xFF 255 | Flashing ghosts, scores, text, ghost eyes, fruit highlights |
More details about the Pac-Man color palette: aarongiles.com/mamemem/part3.html.
Titles
Language | Native | Transliteration | Translation |
---|---|---|---|
English | Pac-Man | ||
Japanese | パックマン | Pakkuman | Pakku Man |
Links
- Pages with broken file links
- Video Game Rating - 4
- Video Game Graphics Rating - 4
- Video Game Sound Rating - 3
- Games
- Video Games
- 1980 Video Games
- Video Game Prime Order - Action, Strategy, Adventure
- Video Game Genre - Maze
- Android Games
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- Arcade Games
- Atari 5200 Games
- Atari 8-bit Games
- Commodore 64 Games
- FM-7 Games
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- Video Games I Haven't Beaten