Pac-Man

This was the first time a player took on a persona in the game. Instead of controlling inanimate objects like tanks, paddles and missile bases, players now controlled a 'living' creature. It was something that people could identify, like a hero.—Leonard Herman in Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames

Pac-Man is a bright yellow ball-shaped creature happily munching points (or whatever they are) as he makes his way through the maze, hunted by four monsters that were later misinterpreted as ghosts. When he munches one of the bigger bonus points, the monsters become small and scared and start running away from him for a while, and now he can hunt them. But careful, it won't last for long. Once he has munched all the points on the level, he proceeds—guess what?—to the next.

The Monsters

Yes, they are monsters, they are not ghosts. They have not only different colors, they have names, and they have different AI as well.

Oikake stays close on Pac-Man's heels; Machibuse goes to the opposite end of the corridor Pac-Man is in; Kimagure just moves in his general direction; Otoboke moves randomly, but generally into the direction of Pac-Man. The Japanese nicknames refer either to the color or, in the case of Otoboke, to the stupidity of the monster, so I have not given translations.

Clones and Variants

Just like Breakout (Arkanoid) or Tetris, Pac-Man is based on a simple concept that is good for countless variations. And few games exist in more variations. There were nearly a dozen derivative coin-op machines, and there is not a single PC version that could claim to be the original one. Pac-Man is easy to code, and has been coded over and over again.

Pac-Man for DOS
3-Demon	ACK! Man	CD-Man	Chompsters!
Cruncher	Eat It	Gobble Man	GobMan
Greedy	K³	Mr. Muncher	Ms PacMan
Pac-Bar	Pac-Bar II	Pac-Gal	Pac-Girl
Pac-Maine	Pac-Man	Pac-Mon	Pac PC
Packman	Pako	Pako II	PCMan
Poke-Man	Super Pac-Mon	Titanman	Wilf II
Pac-Man for Windows
Chomp	Ms. Chomp	Patuman	WinPac

Random Pac-Man Facts

• The original name of Pac-Man was Puck Man.
• While Pac-Man is generally depicted in manual and cover art with arms and legs attached directly to his face, Atari represented him with a stick-figure-like torso for their 400/800 version.
• Probably the funniest homage is in Wolfenstein 3D, where one secret level is layed out like a typical Pac-Man level, and you are hunted by the lookalikes of the famous monsters that cannot be killed, just evaded.
• The correct spelling is Pac-Man. Yet, if you search for Pac-Man on Google, it will ask if you meant to search for "Pacman", but not the other way round! (Update 2006-07-15: This was true when I first set up this page in 2003, but is no longer. The change, however, may be primarily due to the different way google meanwhile treats hyphenations. But then there were twice as many search results for Pac-Man, and a definition was offered for this spelling, but not for Pacman.)

Pac-Man Links

• Pac-Man Ate My Penis, "Josh" claims, still he spent what must have been quite an amount of time to compile The Incredibly Fucking Complete Pac-Man Game List. It was hosted on overclockers.org and went down sometimes in 2006, I salvaged most of it from the Wayback Machine, only a few pics are missing.
• The First Church of Pac-Man took nearly two minutes to load on my cable connection, back in 2003. For some reason, its creators thought it cool to put nearly everything on a single page, a page that with its 34 images is now approximately half a Meg. As the title suggests, it takes a humoristic approach. But you will find interesting stuff here, like a boxshot of the original Puck Man.
• The Virtual Pac-Man Museum does not stop here, but lists licensed stuff like food and jewelry too.
• Animal Controlled Computer Games

  Instead of computer code, I wanted to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, I built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts.