Atari Hacker Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 Let's talk about the game that disappointed us all! Pacman, on the atari 2600! It was nothing like the arcade version, and they rushed it and released an unfinished prototype! All for Atari's money making scam! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlvinKarpis Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 Let's talk about the game that disappointed us all! Pacman, on the atari 2600! It was nothing like the arcade version, and they rushed it and released an unfinished prototype! All for Atari's money making scam! How was it a scam? Atari was a large company, of course the #1 goal was to make money No scam about it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amstari Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Let's talk about the game that disappointed us all! Pacman, on the atari 2600! It was nothing like the arcade version, and they rushed it and released an unfinished prototype! All for Atari's money making scam! Have you read "Racing the Beam"? It has a great chapter all about Pac-Man. I wouldn't say it "disappointed us all". Not everyone had played the arcade version so they weren't making any comparisons. I never had the game when I was a kid but I don't think I would have been disappointed, I just would have thought it was cool to be able to play Pac-Man at home. I wasn't old enough to go to the arcades. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maiki Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 (edited) Considering the limitations of the system, Pac Man was a decent effort. Not to mention it plays really well, unlike many of those homemade C-64 Puck man clones that are just rubbish... I still say Pac Man for Atari 2600 is a decent port with balanced gameplay which is reallly important.. it owns many of those cheap 8-bit wanna beee ports... Just keep in mind that Pac Man is a genuine 4k ROM! There's no cheating in this game, no bankswitching, no additional RAM rubbish...pure ATari 2600 4k stuff... owned Edited October 30, 2011 by maiki Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RevEng Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 I think Atari's pacman on the 2600 was ok. Nothing groundbreaking, but it's not fair to call it an unfinished prototype either. Dennis Debro demonstrated how close Atari could have come to the arcade version with his pacman 4k homebrew. If Atari had released a version like this one it certainly would have gone over much better! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gorfcadet Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 I agree, as a kid, I just thought hey its Pac Man... at home. Even then I knew home versions were never gonna be as good as the arcade. We played it a ton at my grandpa's house. I remember my uncles tearing it up while my turn lasted like 5 seconds. Nobody was complaining back then. I don't think anyone was crying foul until the gaming press took off and told us how upset we were supposed to be. PM was pretty early for Atari... saying they could've done better at the time was a little unfair. They did do better... it was called Ms Pac Man... but it came later after a few new tricks were added to the system's programming repetiore. Pac Man was still a major leap past Space War and Basic Math. 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schizophretard Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Pacman was my dad's favorite game and I remember having lots of fun with it. When I was little I never compared Atari games to arcade games. I didn't even think of them both as video games. Atari was a video game and arcade games were Indiana Beach games, Showbiz Pizza games.... Video games were for home and other games were for vacations and birthday parties. Arcade games felt like playing skee ball on a screen and video games felt like playing with toys on screen. It just felt different. The only comparisons I made were fun and not fun. When dad was having the time of his life playing it with me and sneaking me sips of beer while mom wasn't looking that was fun. Turning the game off was not fun. I don't even think I saw the arcade version back then. I do remember seeing another version years later(in kid time maybe 2 to 3 years) on this amazing SUPER Atari at summer day care. Up until that point I never seen anything so amazing! The kid must of got it from the future and I don't have a time machine! He plugged in joysticks, put in a cart, hit a few keys, and Pacman with super 1080P high definition graphics came on the screen. I was happy but then sad because no one is rich enough to get one of those. 25 years later ....date today.... I think I'm going to have to start collecting Atari 400/800. I don't have a time machine but I did find the SUPER Atari in the future after all and I'm "rich" enough to have one. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
high voltage Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Same here, never played the arcade version, to me Pac-Man was top. Played it for hours Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toiletunes Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 "Pac Man disappointed us all" is turning into an urban legend, along with "ET caused the market crash" and "Everyone hated the 5200 controllers." What are the other great Atari Misconceptions? (I know there's more but can't think of them offhand) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trinity Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 The 2600 version sucks. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trinity Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Ms. Pacman rocks!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Hacker Posted October 30, 2011 Author Share Posted October 30, 2011 "Pac Man disappointed us all" is turning into an urban legend, along with "ET caused the market crash" and "Everyone hated the 5200 controllers." What are the other great Atari Misconceptions? (I know there's more but can't think of them offhand) Yeah, it's what most websites say. Gotta admit, I own it and like it myself The other pacman games were better I find, but it was released as an unfinished proto, so you can't compare that to later on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 None of the arcade-port games released up to that point had been anything like their coin-swallowing counterparts. Even Space Invaders, which I thought was a great game, had different-looking graphics, fewer invading aliens to deal with, and a landscape instead of portrait orientation that put the invaders closer to you at the start of the game. The important thing was capturing the spirit of the gameplay; which Pacman did. I think the real disappointment came later with Ms Pacman, when we got a better sense of "what could have been". But Ms Pacman had more ROM to work with, and the benefit of more time passing to understand how to program a game of that type. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LS650 Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 "Everyone hated the 5200 controllers." What are the other great Atari Misconceptions? Well, there's a lot of truth behind some legends.... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlvinKarpis Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 but it was released as an unfinished proto, Why do you keep saying that? It was not released as an unfinished prototype 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2600 Posted October 31, 2011 Share Posted October 31, 2011 I first played 2600 Pac-Man probably around 1984, I was about 6 years old. My father bought a 2600 second hand around then, and had maybe 10 games or less. I always like the challenge of that game. Now I new and played the original arcade Pac-Man throughout the 80's, but as a little kid, I simply didn't comprehend that the home version was that much different. I just figured certain arcade games were much better than the 2600 versions. In fact, around that time, my cousins had Atari 800's and Pac-Man for that. We used to play it on there too, but again, we never really harped on the graphical differences. If Pac-Man never existed, and this game was released, I think people would have little issue with it. I never knew there was such a problem until maybe 10 years ago when I started reading about the complaints on the internet. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss 2600 Posted October 31, 2011 Share Posted October 31, 2011 I got Pac-Man and Asteroids free with my Sears Telegames 4-switch. I knew what I was getting because I played Pac-Man 2600 at a friend's house. I liked Pac-Man, not so much to play but as a character. I collected all kinds of Pac-Man stuff and still have a collection proudly displayed. I was just happy to have Pac-Man for the 2600 (heck, I was happy to finally get a 2600). I really liked (and still do) the box art shown in post #4. It is much better than the cartridge label. I knew it wouldn't be like the arcade game and didn't play the arcade game much anyway because I wasn't good at it and a quarter a game was expensive to me at the time. I wasn't disappointed; but, then again, I don't have the perspective of being a bit older with a more critical mind, waiting with anticipation for the game's release and buying it with my own money for its original retail price. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DemonoidTentacle Posted October 31, 2011 Share Posted October 31, 2011 When I first played PacMan on the 2600, I turned it off after a few goes. BUT, I had played Ms PacMan first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skylark68 Posted October 31, 2011 Share Posted October 31, 2011 This was one of the first games that we had with our 2600 back in the day. My brother and I played it over and over again (particularly game variation no. 3). I believe we bought it soon at the initial release because my Dad actually bought us the system and the game the same day and the release of Pac-Man was a deciding factor for him (I wanted Warlords). Combat and Pac-Man were our only 2 games for at least a couple of months. Needless to say I had played the arcade version (although I wasn't a huge fan), but back in those days everyone knew that the arcades were much better than the home versions and no one complained that I knew. It was awesome that you could play Pac-Man at home. Remember that while the 2600 was no longer state of the art by this time, it was the only system that allowed you to play Pac-Man at home (at least for a short period of time). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vocelli Posted October 31, 2011 Share Posted October 31, 2011 I was highly disappointed with Pac-man on the 2600 as a kid. I got the game and it looked like Pac- man was eating a Pez. The hit detection is what pissed me off the most. I would round corners and barely be touch and BAM life lost. I almost threw the game out the window. But after several days of frustration I learned to accept it. It was ok. But man the first couple of days it suckws. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pioneer4x4 Posted November 1, 2011 Share Posted November 1, 2011 When my cousin first got his for Christmas, we were both horribly dissappointed. We still played it a good bit though. Looking back, it is fairly impressive for 4K and 128 bytes of RAM. After I got the Supercharger and saw it's version of Frogger I was waiting for a PacMan for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrekMD Posted November 1, 2011 Share Posted November 1, 2011 I was disappointed with the way it looked...it was just too different from the arcade. It was still fun to play, though, and play it I did! LOL Now, just like Pioneer said, I kept waiting for a better Pac Man version to come out for the Supercharger! It took a few years but I finally got to see better versions made right here on AA! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobotech Posted November 1, 2011 Share Posted November 1, 2011 (edited) I just hated those sound effects so much. I never got the 2600 version myself. I had gotten an Atari 400 and bought the game (on tape) Ghost Hunter for and thought it was much better than the 2600 version that came out. When the 400 version of Pacman came out, that just sealed the deal and I really never played my 2600 much after that. I sold it soon thereafter. But for me, it was those horrid sound effects that really turned me off to the game when I played it at friend's houses. Edited November 1, 2011 by bobotech Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emehr Posted November 1, 2011 Share Posted November 1, 2011 When I first played Pac-Man on the 2600 I was pretty young (5, I think) and had never played the arcade version at that point. All I knew was that it was fun to play. No disappointment here. I liked E.T. too. So there. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rex Dart Posted November 1, 2011 Share Posted November 1, 2011 I have a mixed opinion on VCS Pac Man. One one hand, I can see & agree with the idea that the VCS wasn't really meant for Pac Man, you can't expect perfect arcade ports on it, and that the programmer did a technically decent job of making something that resembled Pac Man. One the other hand, VCS Pac Man stinks. It's not fun to play, and it shouldn't have been released in the condition that it was. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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