Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 3-16-82
If you know anything about gaming in the pre-NES days than you probably already know that Pac-Man on the 2600 is notorious, often considered to be one of the most disastrous video game releases of all time. It’s often credited, along with E.T., as destroying not only the Atari 2600 but the entire American gaming industry. It’s also the best-selling game Atari ever released to the home market. It sold around 8 million copies when there were only around 9 million consoles sold. It’s hard to imagine a video game owned by almost 90% of a console’s users, but this is how much faith Atari had in Pac-Man. Atari never marketed a game so heavily, and never had more confidence. The old legends states that they produced 12 million copies in the expectation that Pac-Man would get people to buy a console the same way Space Invaders had a couple years previously. It’s one of those game like Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt that even if you’ve never played a video game in your life you will inexplicably find a copy of it when you’re cleaning out your attic. So how does Atari’s biggest and most important release up to that point end up going so horribly wrong? Well, that’s the story Atari fans have been trying to figure out for the last forty years.
Since you already know what Pac-Man is like I’m going to speculate just a bit. Hey, it’s what Atari fans do. Pac-Man is a deceptively simple game. It has one map, a bunch of dots, some ghosts, one fruit per level, and Pac-Man himself. It just doesn’t sound that difficult to reproduce. By this point Atari had started to develop a reputation for respectable home ports. Their port of Space Invaders was home gaming’s first major hit, and they had also recently been making high quality versions of their own arcade games like Asteroids and Missile Command. Unfortunately, technology moves quickly, and the 2600 was nearly five years old by the time they tried to port Pac-Man. That’s usually around the time a company starts planning to upgrade to a new console. Atari would do that with the 5200 later in the year, so they knew they weren’t going to be able to get by on 1977 technology for much longer. Pac-Man was so complicated that developer Tod Frye had to make concessions just about everywhere. By all accounts the game was worked on extremely hard. It wasn’t quite the rush job that E.T. was. Frye put in everything he had hoping for a miracle. He ended up with a miracle, but only a miracle for video game writers. It’s one of the rarest of all video games. Pac-Man is an arcade port that gets almost nothing right. It is the most spectacular kind of failure that will still be talked about for generations. Am I being too harsh? Well, let’s look at the details.
Close your eyes and think of Pac-Man for a moment. What do you see? I bet even if you only have a passing interest in video games you can picture it. It’s all about that iconic blue maze and solidly colored ghosts. There is only one maze, but it’s designed well enough that it’s always fun to traverse. Pac-Man has that constantly flapping mouth with his iconic waka-waka sound. There’s the iconic fruit that changes every level. Everybody loves that fruit. Even the smaller details, like the placement of the teleporter holes, are iconic. Well, Atari 2600 Pac-Man has almost none of these things. The color scheme is all messed up with a weird brownish color replacing the iconic blue and constantly flickering, pale ghosts that mostly look the same. Pac-Man’s mouth opens straight up and down instead of triangular, and the waka-waka is replaced with more of a generic Atari bloop. The fruit has been replaced by a big rectangle. Even the scoring is off. The last zero was taken off the scores which means all the points are divided by ten. Single dots are only worth one point and you know how much I hate things only being worth one point. One of two major changes from the arcade game would be alright, but it’s the fact that everything is different that really hurts. The only thing worse would be if the maze was completely ruined. Well I’m happy to say that in this version the maze is in fact completely ruined. Hey, bad things can make me happy too.
If your game only has one screen than it better be a great screen. Pac-Man manages this by having a classic maze full of twists and turns that takes longer to learn than it appears. Strategies will change depending on where you are and what the ghosts are up to. The Atari version eliminates the challenge of the maze by replacing practically everything with uninspired rectangle loops. It really is one of the most boring mazes I have ever seen. There’s no strategy here. Just move around in your little rectangles and try to stay away from ghosts. There are a couple of lanes where you can go all the way from bottom to top, but something about this feel weird and I can’t quite explain it. The maze doesn’t make the game unplayable, but it sure makes it dull. If you’re putting everything you have into the most important game you’ve ever made than you sure don’t want it to be boring. How depressing is it that all the concessions made to get the game on console didn’t help make it any more fun. Everything was stripped away and it still ended up slow and boring. You can ruin the graphics and mostly get away with it, but ruin the gameplay and the battle is lost.
It’s not hard to see why this game left a bad taste in people’s mouths in 1982. Atari released several other versions of Pac-Man on other consoles in 1982-1983, and this might’ve even made things worse. All of Atari’s other versions were much more faithful to the original, including one on the competing Intellivision console. Did Atari just not care about their main user base anymore? Why is the one they actually expected to sell end up so bad when versions on lesser-known consoles fare so much better? It almost feels like one of those conspiracy moments where they released a bad version on their old console to get people to buy the better version on 5200. Of course, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have made millions upon millions of Pac-Man carts. No, it’s just the typical depressing reason. The money was more important than the quality, so it was released even though it obviously wasn’t very fun.
So now it’s time to rate this thing, and I don’t think it’s going to go quite as low as I expected. It’s dull but not egregiously awful. It still has a passing resemblance to the real thing, so it’s not completely devoid of entertainment value. I hesitate to call it fun, but it’s definitely disappointing. It’s certainly helping me meet my quota for adverbs at least. I can’t quite bump it up into the okay section, but it’s not the lowest ranked Atari game either. I’m putting it at #129 overall which puts it right above Space Jockey. Two spaces down and it would’ve ended up in the shockingly bad section. Hey, I’m not mad Pac-Man, just very disappointed.
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