Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
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| 'Pac-Man' | |
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| Developer(s) | Tod Frye (Atari) |
| Publisher(s) | Atari |
| Release date(s) | 1982 |
| Genre(s) | Maze |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, two-player alternating |
| Platform(s) | Atari 2600 |
The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man was developed and published by Atari in 1982. It was the first port of the arcade game developed by Namco which had been firstly released in Japan in 1979 and then in the US in 1980. Atari was the licensee for the video game console rights.
At the time, the 2600 was the most popular video game console in the world and Pac-Man was the most popular arcade game in the world, so Atari widely promoted the 2600 version of the game. Upon release, however, the quality of the adaptation of the game was criticized and sales were well below expectations, and even those who bought and kept the game were often dissatisfied. Along with E.T. (also for the 2600), Pac-Man is believed to have triggered the video game crash of 1983 by destroying customer loyalty to Atari and, by extension, consumer confidence in video games in general.
The poor quality of the port is blamed on the Atari marketing department's rush to bring the game to the market. They asked Tod Frye, one of Atari's principal game programmers, to do the port; he showed them a prototype he had already developed. Rather than miss the approaching 1981 Christmas season, Atari produced the game based on the unfinished prototype.
Although Atari sold seven million units, out of a ten-million 2600-user base, twelve million cartridges were manufactured, under the expectation that the game would re-stimulate sales of the console. When this did not happen, Atari had to write off the five million unsold copies, incurring large losses.
[edit] Porting differences
While it is easy to attribute the low system capabilities of the Atari 2600 to the poor quality of the port, Atari's own subsequent release of Ms. Pac-Man proved that the quality of the port could have been considerably higher. Several Atari 2600 homebrew programmers have also reproduced remarkably accurate conversions of the arcade game to the system, most notably Nukey Shay's Hack'em. The main culprit has to do with Atari's refusal to grant Tod Frye more memory, and more importantly, more time to improve the game's accuracy.
[edit] Graphics
At the time, the ability to produce color was a technical achievement, and the marketing department at Atari felt that it was important to stress the color capabilities of the Atari. They asked programmers to avoid displaying games against a black background, unless the background was intended to be outer space. As a result, the maze on the 2600 port was given orange walls and a blue background, instead of blue walls on a black background. (Similar treatment was given to the Atari 2600 conversion of Ms. Pac-Man)
While the arcade's screen was oriented vertically, standard television sets were oriented horizontally. It appears that Tod initially intended to rotate the maze ninety degrees counter-clockwise to account for the difference. This lead to the escape tunnels appearing on the top and the bottom, and the ghosts leaving from the "top" of the pen, which is now oriented on the right side. Despite the rotation, Pac-Man and the bonus vitamin still appear on the bottom portion of the screen, as opposed to the left side if the screen rotation was universally applied.
Each of the game's four enemies only appears in one out of every four frames; due to persistence of vision, this presents the illusion of having four flickering enemies on the screen at once. Because of the flicker, the instruction manual calls the enemies "ghosts" instead of "monsters" as in the arcade game. This flicker also makes the colors of the ghosts almost indiscernible (appearing to be a pale yellow or green), but the ghosts are in fact colored differently from one another (apparently light shades of red, yellow, blue, and green which don't stand out well against the saturated blue background). The eyes of the ghosts on the 2600 port spin constantly, while the eyes of the monsters in the arcade game indicate their direction of movement.
Unlike the arcade game, the mouth of the Pac-Man character on the 2600 port continuously opens and closes, even when not moving. Likewise, the Pac-Man sprite always looks left or right, even when going up and down. Other graphical differences include the dots on the original game becoming dashes in the 2600 port. All of the bonus fruit symbols became two-color invariable rectangles, known as a vitamin.
[edit] Sound
The ever present siren wail from the arcade is missing entirely. A siren is only persistent during the beginning of the ghosts' blue time after Pac-Man eats a power pill. The sound of eating the dots was also changed: on the 2600 port it is a harsh "burmp" sound, unlike the arcade version's "waka waka." The introduction jingle was substantially shortened to four notes.
[edit] Gameplay
Tod Frye attempted to differentiate the ghosts behavior with a simple binary table which maps the each ghost's ID. The difference between the speeds is self-explanatory with fast ghosts moving more quickly through the maze than slow ghosts. The distinction between "dumb" and "smart" ghosts is that dumb ghosts follow a pseudo-random path through the maze, while smart ghosts attempt to close the distance between themselves and Pac-Man by finding the shortest path to Pac-Man position.
| ID | binary | speed | intelligence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 00 | slow | dumb |
| 1 | 01 | slow | smart |
| 2 | 10 | fast | dumb |
| 3 | 11 | fast | smart |
Scoring in the game is generally reduced by a power of 10 (e.g. dots are worth 1 point instead of 10, the first blue ghost is worth 20 points instead of 200, etc.) Additionally, an extra life is awarded upon the completion of every stage as opposed to being awarded just once at 10,000 points.
[edit] Modern-day hacks
Several Atari 2600 homebrew programmers have risen to the challenge to hack original Atari 2600 ROMs into a more accurate version of Pac-Man, or to start entirely from scratch. Among the best versions available, there is:
- Nukey Shay's hack of Tod Frye's Pac-Man which correctly colors the maze, dots, and ghost, as well as adding bonus fruits, score value sprites, slightly improved sound, and even intermissions.
- Mr. Pac-Man which is a hack of the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man to look and sound more like Pac-Man. Initially started by Rob Kudla, it was further improved upon by "El Destructo".
- Nukey Shay's Hack'em which also includes Hack'em Plus, Hangly-Man, and Hangly-Man Plus. It is considered the most advanced and accurate port of Pac-Man to the Atari 2600.
[edit] Popular culture
The sound effects from Pac-Man on the 2600 are often used as stock sound effects in film and television to illustrate a game being played in the background of a scene, even if the game being shown is a different one on the Atari 2600 or even a different game console or arcade game.
Pac-Man's death sound from the 2600 port has been used in other instances: the 1983 arcade game Crystal Castles uses it as the start-up sound, the 2004 Nintendo game Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door uses it as Lord Crump's theme[citation needed], and it appears in a 2006 Summer TV advertisement for Taco Bell, even though the character was shown holding a PlayStation 2 controller.[citation needed]
