There are a few characters in all media that virtually everyone recognizes. Perhaps one of the most well known characters in the world would have to be Pac-Man. Debuting in 1980, the original Pac-Man went on to achieve success seldom seen by any individual character, much less a video game character. Over a quarter million arcade units have been installed, he had his own Saturday morning cartoon series in the 1980s, a top-ten hit single song named after him, numerous amounts of sequels and quite a few spin off products over his 30+ years of existence.
So to many it seems highly inconceivable that Pac-Man could be anything but great for the gaming industry. It definitely may appear that at the time, Pac-Man could do no harm. That is exactly where the biggest problem lay. There are times when the popularity of something or someone can be the bane of their own existence. Then again, it wouldn't be fair to blame Pac-Man completely as it was his popularity that was mishandled and misunderstood by developers.
They could've y'know, not spent so much time on the title screen
In the late-1970s, Atari was riding high as the king of the video game industry. They had made a deal with arcade gaming developer Namco to produce home console ports of their games. By the time Pac-Man had made it to the United States in late-1980 the game quickly became a resounding success. Thanks to their previous agreement, Atari began production on the home port of the game in 1981 ready to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.
What the crap happened to Pac-Man? Why does he have a savage under bite?
Tod Frye, a programmer and game designer, was tasked with converting the game from the arcade for the Atari 2600. Issues began at the start with the sheer difference between mediums. The original Pac-Man arcade machine was a much more powerful machine when compared to the Atari. The Pac-Man machine had 2KB of RAM while the cartridge version could only store 128B of RAM.
I wonder if the ghost was the spirit of failure. At least the dashes look delicious.
The technical limitations were enough to force Frye to strip down the graphics of the arcade machine. Pac-Man went from round to blocky, the dots/pills turned into long wafers and virtually anything rounded on the arcade version became blocky. The Atari 2600 version also simply redrew the map sans any "wafers" that had been consumed by Pac-Man. There was only one ghost present in each frame, though it would rotate between the four to give the illusion that there were four.
But it wasn't just technical limitations that plagued the game. Tod Frye demanded to be paid royalties on each cartridge sold or he would abandon the project and transfer to Atari's growing competitor, Activsion. Atari relented and agreed to pay him $0.10 on each cartridge sold which, considering how high sales estimates were, meant that Frye could feasibly have become a millionaire.
The real issue was that Atari had too high of hopes for the game. They assumed that, due to its popularity, that all they had to do was keep the game play somewhat similar and that every single person who played Pac-Man would immediately go out and buy a copy of the cartridge for home use. They also had fairly unrealistic expectations on how fast they could create the game; Frye had finished all the programming in just 6 weeks while initial hopes were to release the game for the holiday rush in 1981. This required Frye to cut as many corners as possible and even with that, it wasn't until March of 1982 that the game was finished.
Atari began to invest heavily into advertising the game before its launch, taking out ads in national publication, prompting J.C. Penny to take out a nation-wide television advertisement... The first of its kind in all of gaming up to that point.
What a lie. They're implying Pac-Man was three dimensional and looked anything like normal.
Original estimates at the time was that there were approximately 10 million Atari 2600 systems were in use by people. Due to the success of the arcade version of Pac-Man, Atari opted to produce 12 million cartridges, expecting millions of more people to buy the 2600 just to play Pac-Man at home. This, in turn, would make Tod Frye a millionaire.
I thought they were suppose to be pills, not caffeinated gum. Unless it's joke gum. I hate this game.
The game was launched with incredible success, selling 7 million copies in the matter of months. Unfortunately, the public as a whole panned the game. Many were disappointed by the stark differences in graphics and sound between the original and the port. Atari was soon stuck with 5 million in storage and that number began to grow as a surprising number of people returned the game demanding refunds.
The results were catastrophic. Warner Communications, which owned Atari at the time, quickly lost 35% of its stock value, resulting in over $1 billion in losses. Confidence in Atari dropped sharply among the public after the release and the game is seen as part of the fall of Atari. The game was such a failure that many people point to it and only a few other factors as the reason the video game market crashed in 1983 and almost ended the industry completely.
The game was perhaps doomed from the start considering the technological differences between arcade machines and the Atari 2600. In 1981, it was started to become a bit outdated and was simply unable to live up to the expectations everyone had of it and the game.
These cutting edge graphics are such a relief compared to the crap I was just writing about.
By the way, I've played it. It's... Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's nowhere near as good as the original and I question whether they could've actually captured and ported the arcade experience at home. I suppose if the joysticks had gum on them and they could've released a cassette with children screaming and the stench of broken dreams, they could've come close.
