A Pac-Man comparison circa 1983

[BSA Starfire]

OK we all say the 2600 version of Pac-Man was a travesty, not worthy to be plugged into the holy cart slot of our beloved 2600.

Well what were the alternatives in say 1983? I live in the UK so this is a little British-centric, i have chosen 3 British micro's from the time, all common and under £200 back then, a similar cost to a new Atari VCS with a £30 pac-man cart.

The machines are:Dragon 32 ,released in 1982 @ £199, Sinclair Spectrum 48K, released in 1982 @ £199. Oric 1 48K released in 1983 @ £179. You also need to figure in a cost of between £30 and £40 for the cassette recorder so you can load the game. Games were roughly £6/£7 each on tape.

 

OK the games!

 

First up is Gobbleman (no sniggering at the back!) on the Sinclair spectrum by Artic Computing released in 1982. It runs in 16K and is a machine code program(hence LOAD""CODE). Controls are keys only using Q,A,O,P, not bad selections and the responce is pretty tight. Maze is nice a chunky and also blue with smooth corners, however no escape tunnels here. The ghosts are quite well drawn but have no intelligence whatsoever, wandering randomly around the maze. Gameplay is very fast, too fast to be honest & the main gripe right now is that the power pills don't always work! The ghosts flash when you have eaten a pill and depending on the blink cycle you pass right trough them, hopeless! The lost life animation is also very poor, your pac cycles through the standard speccy character set, lazy. On the plus side the sound is OK for the age but sounds nothing like the arcade. The game has a nice high score table.

 

 

Oric Munch for the ORIC 1 48K Tansoft 1983.

Again keyboard only control using A,Z, ",? Good selection and very resposive. The maze is purple and again has no escape tunnels. Graphics are well drawn and reasonably smooth. Maze is purple but has nine variations, the oddity is the power pills are not always situated in each corner. Again the ghosts seem to have no intelligence, just random movement.

The real problem with this one is you only have 1 life(shades of Videopac/Odyssey 2). The sound is good, nice and meaty!

 

Scarfman Dragon 32 Microdeal 1982.

 

Machine code game(CLOADM).

Controls Joysticks or cursor keys.

Well the graphics are awful! Just look at the screen shot, the Dragon was capably of much more than this, sadly I couldn't track down another Pac game so this is it! The maze layout is oK and at least we have the escape tunnels this time. No AI on the ghost again and the speed is too high even on the slowest setting, also the controls are sticky as hell. Sound is just a few beeps and blips, sad as the Dragon is capably of really decent sound. You guys should see the great Donkey Kong clone The King!

 

The Spectrum also had a good few other Pac-Man variants release over the years, here are some I have gathered together:

Gulpman 1982 Campbell systems.(lasers instead of power pills!)

Spectres 1982 Bug Byte.(lay the dots instead of eat'em)

Pakacuda 1982 Rabbit Software.(it's Pesco!)

Muncher! 1982 Silversoft.

Gobble a Ghost 1982 CDS Micros.

Haunted Hedges 1983 Micromega.

Ghost Hunt 1984 Kryptronic.

Gnasher 1984 Mastertronic(best Pacman on the speccy @ only cost £1.99 in the day!)

 

 

Hopefully this might make you take another look at 2600 pacman, it's not perfect but niether was the competition!

I have ignored the Atari 400 & Commodore 64 as they were very, very expensive over here and the 5200 was never released.

Gotta be said though folks the old 2600 is the clear winner here in my book!

 

Best,

Chris

[Lord Thag]

Interesting read! I agree, the whole 'Pac Man Sucks' thing is a new invention, rather like 'ET didn't sell well because it sucks' (and was the fifth best selling atari cart ever in reality). I never thought Atari Pac man sucked, per se, back in the eighties, but neither was I under any illusions that it was a great game.

 

Over here, Commodore 64s, Atari 800s, and Apple IIs were the main PCs you saw. Atari had a great version of Pacman on the 800, as did the C64. Even the Apple version looked reasonably close, if you could get by the fact that eating the dots sounded like a woodpecker was banging on your house. All of them resembled the Arcade game to a reasonable degree, unlike the Atari 2600 version.

 

That said, I owned and played the home version. Rather a lot, actually. Everyone I knew just kind of took it on it's own merits. It was 'pac-manish', and fun, but no substitute for the arcade.

[ZylonBane]

I agree, the whole 'Pac Man Sucks' thing is a new invention

No, it isn't.

[Herbarius]

Atari had a great version of Pacman on the 800, as did the C64.

Yes, those were nearly Arcade perfect clones (virtually identical to each other btw)!

 

Also I don't hate the 2600 Pac-Man. Yesterday I played it quite excessively on my VCS. However it helps if you don't think about it as a "version of Pac-Man" but more as a "game similar to Pac-Man"

Edited May 2, 2009 by Herbarius

[+Nathan Strum]

I agree, the whole 'Pac Man Sucks' thing is a new invention

Nope. It was widely reviled when it came out. I even ignored all the bad reports (since I was a huge arcade Pac-Man fan) and bought it anyway thinking, "Well, it can't be that bad - it's Pac-Man!". I played it for part of an afternoon, and returned it to the store the next day. I'd never been that disappointed in a game. Fortunately, I knew the guy who ran the place, and he was nice enough to give me a refund (he knew I'd just spend the money there again, anyway). He didn't do that with everyone though - too many people wanted to send their copies back.

[Zoyx]

Me an my friend bought Pac-man the day it hit the shelves. We were disappointed, but I don't think we said it sucked. We played it, and we competed. I still play an occasional game of it. The homebrew remake of it was much better.

[Dauber]

My thoughts are all here:

 

http://scattered-frog.blogspot.com/2006/06...ts-bad-rap.html

 

But in summary, I didn't think it sucked then, and I don't think it sucked now, especially after hearing the story of how it came to be.

[Bakasama]

Interesting read! I agree, the whole 'Pac Man Sucks' thing is a new invention, ...

 

Then why Debro went through the trouble of creating a homebrew that looked as close to the arcade game. He was really disappointed that Atari's Pac-Man was good as it could be.

[Nukey Shay]

The topic is flawed...since program sizes and target platforms differ (I have to wonder why Atari's own 8-bit version was not included, since it was programmed at the same time as the 2600 port). Indeed, the most-faithful clone of the game at that time was not included either - Apple]['s Taxman (which was later taken by Atari and hacked into their Atarisoft version for that system). Not to mention, Tod Frye's original concept game which was never produced. As such, comparing a 2600 4k game to something on another platform (even if the size remains constant) is irrelevant...because nearly every other platform has more resources at their disposal to create a better game. As Taxman proves, creating a clone of the title could land you in court at the time. This happened to the Bally and O2 clones.

 

As a result, there's nothing that you can really compare it to. The aspects have to remain the same...Atari 2600, 4k, 6 weeks' production time. Nobody knows how much the latter was affected during the 4k/8k argument...but I believe that it did have an impact (some things that the 2600 program does are better suited to a larger rom size). It's not unreasonable to assume that Frye was still bucking for 8k into his afforded programming schedule, and partially influenced how certian things were coded.

 

Ultimately, the world will never know what could have been produced. 2600 Pac-Man was sabotaged by it's own company's executives.

[BSA Starfire]

The topic is flawed...since program sizes and target platforms differ (I have to wonder why Atari's own 8-bit version was not included, since it was programmed at the same time as the 2600 port). Indeed, the most-faithful clone of the game at that time was not included either - Apple]['s Taxman (which was later taken by Atari and hacked into their Atarisoft version for that system). Not to mention, Tod Frye's original concept game which was never produced. As such, comparing a 2600 4k game to something on another platform (even if the size remains constant) is irrelevant...because nearly every other platform has more resources at their disposal to create a better game. As Taxman proves, creating a clone of the title could land you in court at the time. This happened to the Bally and O2 clones.

 

As a result, there's nothing that you can really compare it to. The aspects have to remain the same...Atari 2600, 4k, 6 weeks' production time. Nobody knows how much the latter was affected during the 4k/8k argument...but I believe that it did have an impact (some things that the 2600 program does are better suited to a larger rom size). It's not unreasonable to assume that Frye was still bucking for 8k into his afforded programming schedule, and partially influenced how certian things were coded.

 

Ultimately, the world will never know what could have been produced. 2600 Pac-Man was sabotaged by it's own company's executives.

Hi Nukey,

 

I left out the Atari 8-bit & Apple 2 & C64 as I was trying to keep in what was affordable in the UK in 1983. All these machines were monstorously expensive and only had very limited distrubution channels here. The 800 cost four times as much as the Spectrum and the Apple even more. I wasn't trying to be technical about the platforms either, just showing what a 12 year old kid had a choice of if he/she wanted to play a Pac game at home in 1983. Whitin that framework I think the 2600 pacman stands up very well ignoring all the technical stuff.

Best regards,

Chris

[rasty]

Humm.. it's interesting to see how, in quite a few years I've been away from this board, things have not changed really and each time Pac-Man for the 2600 comes up, the usual love/hate discussions ensue!

 

I guess that, at least, Pac-Man 2600 has for sure a merit in being able to spark such confrontations for what seems to be forever and ever

 

Anyway, the post was a nice read!

 

Atari had a great version of Pacman on the 800, as did the C64.

Humm.. I don't recall the C64 version being spectacularly good, not bad surely but I recall I expected quite a bit more bells & whistles from it at the time, which were surely delivered by Ms. Pac Man!

[Nukey Shay]

I left out the Atari 8-bit & Apple 2 & C64 as I was trying to keep in what was affordable in the UK in 1983. All these machines were monstorously expensive and only had very limited distrubution channels here. The 800 cost four times as much as the Spectrum and the Apple even more. I wasn't trying to be technical about the platforms either, just showing what a 12 year old kid had a choice of if he/she wanted to play a Pac game at home in 1983. Whitin that framework I think the 2600 pacman stands up very well ignoring all the technical stuff.

 

That was only a part of the of the problem. You could ask yourself if they were unlike Pac-Man enough not to land themselves in court if they had tried to make a more faithful clone.

You may ask yourself if the programmers anticipated that.

You may tell yourself that it's all in the past and doesn't matter.

 

Um...

 

Thinking about this can make you mad as a hatter.

 

 

 

Lettin' the days go by...

[Nukey Shay]

Are hatters mad? What for?

[+LS650]

Are hatters mad?

Yes, actually:

 

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/mad-as-a-hatter.html

Origin

 

Mercury used to be used in the making of hats. This was known to have affected the nervous systems of hatters, causing them to tremble and appear insane. A neurotoxicologist correspondent informs me that "Mercury exposure can cause aggressiveness, mood swings, and anti-social behaviour.", so that derivation is certainly plausible - although there's only that circumstantial evidence to support it.

 

The use of mercury compounds in 19th century hat making and the resulting effects are well-established - mercury poisoning is still known today as 'Mad Hatter's disease'. That could be enough to convince us that this is the source of the phrase. The circumstantial evidence is rather against the millinery origin though and, beyond the fact that hatters often suffered trembling fits, there's little to link hat making to the coining of 'as mad as a hatter'.

[Nukey Shay]

Rip tip. BTW the C64 in 1983 was more affordable than the VCS in 1982.

 

And people complain today about the high price of the PS3...pfft! Back in those days, that was the equalivant to the amount of a couple of games! Which the console INCLUDED. Go figure.