Okay, this was meant to be the article I posted after my July 3rd opus on the Perfect Pac-Man game. However, circumstances being what they are (me = ADD) other things grabbed my attention and I’m just now getting around to posting this followup. In the last article I discussed a little bit of Pac-Man’s history and also covered Billy Mitchell’s achievement in 1999 obtaining the first perfect game of Pac-Man. There’s a lot of pop culture crap that happened between Pac-Man debuting in 1980 and Billy Mitchell cementing his status as “king of the nerds” in 1999. And this is the stuff I love to cover; pop culture crap.
In the ’80s, Pac-Man was HUGE. He was everywhere. The Pac-Man logo and video game character were licensed on hundreds of products to capitalize on what would become the most famous video game of all time. We’ll take a look at some of these products, but first, let’s look at the video game’s lineage.
Pac-Man Sequels
I’m sure you know a few of them, but I doubt you knew there were about thirteen of them, many being exclusive releases on home video consoles. Let’s take a look at some of the more notable sequels in the pantheon of Pac-Man gaming.
After realizing they had a hit on their hands, Bally-Midway decided to sell the video game rights to Atari to develop a port of the game on the extremely popular VCS 2600 in 1981. The media blitz surrounding the impending release was monumental to say the least. Ironic, because next to ET the Extra Terrestrial, this was the worst game ever created for the Atari 2600. And yes, I owned it. The music was awful, the graphics were terrible, the ghosts were dumb and the fruit you normally eat in the middle changed to a “vitamin pill”. Awful. Needless to say, this game was one of the three reasons, in my opinion, that Atari went bankrupt. The other two? The games ET the Extraterrestrial and Donkey Kong. No company could recover from that Trinity of Unholy Suck-i-ness.
Cavalcade of Awesome 