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Pac-Man—the iconic game and character that elevated video games from seedy arcades to a national pastime—is 44 years old. Like many games of its era, the Namco-developed creation features incredibly simple gameplay. You navigate Pac-Man through a maze to clear the board of dots while avoiding ghosts. It’s the type of wackiness that the video game industry excelled at during the 1980s.Simply stating that Pac-Man was popular during the ’80s doesn’t fully capture the game’s cultural impact. You couldn’t avoid the Pac-Man blitz even if you were somehow the lone, cold-hearted fiend who didn’t appreciate the game—there were guidebooks, bed sheets, clocks, tee shirts, board games, and much, much more. Oh, and a few games were also tossed into the mix.Namco has resurrected the dot-eater in a series of sequels and spinoffs in the four decades since Pac-Man’s debut. None quite matched the cultural impact of the original game outside of Ms. Pac-Man, which remains an arcade staple. Still, the franchise has endured for more than 40 years, even when the series strayed from its roots and ventured into action and pinball territory.We celebrate Pac-Man’s 44 years by looking back at the little yellow guy’s most memorable moments, which revolve around the games, television appearances, and a hit novelty song.Are you ready for some Pac-Man goodness? Stroll down memory lane below. And don’t forget to leave a comment below that details your most memorable Pac-Man moment.
1. Pac-Man (1980)This is the classic Namco arcade game that put video games on the map in the eyes of most people. Your mission is to guide Pac-Man through a maze where he gobbles dots while avoiding four enemy ghosts that cause death with a single touch. Pac-Man was so big that it generated over $2 billion in quarters. That’s a lot of allowance money.
2. The Knock-Offs and Spin-Offs Emerge (1981)Namco wasn’t the only company enamored of Pac-Man’s smash success. Bootleggers with dollar signs in their eyes produced knockoffs almost immediately. Hangly-Man (1981), a hacked Pac-Man clone created by Nittoh, tweaked the gameplay but kept the familiar graphics and sound. Data East’s Pac-Man-inspired Lock ‘n’ Chase (1981) lets you control a thief who collects coins in a maze while avoiding the cops.Namco, naturally, wouldn’t sit idly by and let the knockoffs rack up the big quarters. The company took another trip to the well with the bizarre Super Pac-Man (1982), a game that replaced dots with keys, placed fruit behind locked-off sections, and saw the titular hero grow to super-size when he ate Super Pellets. Bally-Midway, the company that distributed Pac-Man in the US, made their own sequels without Namco: Pac-Man Plus (1982), the weird video game-pinball hybrid Baby Pac-Man (1982), and the incredible Ms. Pac-Man (1982).
3. Pac-Man Fever (1982)You know you’re big time when someone pens a song about you. Buckner & Garcia’s ode to Pac-Man, “Pac-Man Fever,” is a hideous novelty song, but America apparently loved the cheese: The track peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Pac-Man Fever album also spawned “Froggy’s Lament,” another video game-inspired song.
4. The Atari Fiasco (1982)Pac-Man was a mega-popular arcade game. The Atari 2600 was a mega-popular home video game console. The pairing of the two should have been instant magic. It was not.Atari’s rushed, technically inferior port of Namco’s smash hit sold an astounding 7 million copies, but there was a high customer return rate due to awful graphics and sound that only remotely resembled the arcade original.
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Consumer disappointment in Pac-Man (and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial a year later) sullied the once grand Atari name and contributed to North America’s legendary 1983 video game crash.
5. The Awful Pac-Man Cartoon (1982 to 1983)If the horrid Pac-Man Atari 2600 port didn’t put a bad taste in gamers’ mouths, the animated series most likely did. Hanna-Barbara’s production took the basic Pac-Man premise and attempted to create a show around the Pac-family (consisting of his wife Pepper, Pac-Baby, dog Chomp-Chomp, and cat Sour Puss). The ghosts were present, but they were the lackeys of the series’ big bad, Mezmaron, who was in no way, shape, or form present in the arcade games. No one lamented its passing when it left the airwaves.
6. Pac-Man Cereal (1983)Pac-Man’s multi-headed assault on American pop culture culminated in General Mills’ 1983 Pac-Man cereal. Somehow the cereal was more accurate to the source material than the TV show, as it featured just the basics—marshmallow Pac-Men and ghosts. One of the Pac-Man cereal commercials had an extremely catchy song that was seemingly intended as a backdoor method to jumpstart a dance craze. Do The Pac-Man!
7. The Perfect Pac-Man Score (1999)Think you’re a Pac-Man ace? Apparently you’ve never seen Billy Mitchell (of The King of Kong fame) in action. Florida’s hot-sauce maven is the first person to rack up an incredible 3,333,360 points, a perfect score, with one quarter. Achieving a perfect score means that you must clear every dot, energizer, ghost, and maze up to level 256. The historic feat took six hours to accomplish.
8. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (2010)Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is the best Pac-game to come along since 1982’s Ms. Pac-Man. This sequel keeps the basic Pac-Man premises—dot eating and ghost dodging—while adding many new features that up the intensity. It features a maze that’s twice as large as the original game’s, bombs, The Matrix-like slow-motion effects, and gameplay that speeds up as you collect points.
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