Was PacMan really a "flop"

[AtariLeaf]

Read the review from the top gaming magazine back then. Page 71.

 

http://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/electronic_games/electronic_games_jun82.pdf

 

They summed it up pretty well: Those desperate for a gobble game will be happy, those that wanted a good arcade port will be disappointed.

 

I think I can say with all honesty that we all knew Pac Man wasn't very good, but we bought it anyways. And the crash didn't happen for another year, so I don't think it's going to be easy to blame a particular game...

 

The article made me chuckle as it mentions that those who demand arcade accuracy should stay away from this port of pacman. If that's the case, people like that should stay away from the 2600 altogether. Arcade accuracy certainly was never its strong suit. Part of the charm, at least for me, is how they attempted to emulate an arcade game on such a limited machine and I'll take to my grave that pacman as it stands is still a fun maze game even if its not arcade accurate.

[PFL]

^

I agree. No system back then was 'arcade accurate' though most claimed in some form or other to be just that! The charm, for me, off all the old systems is the different flavours each systen brought to their respective ports or clones.

 

Pacman on the 2600 is a good game. It's just not the arcade game but then neither was Asteroids, Missile Command or Space Invaders...

 

In my world as a youngster the game was far from a flop in any form. It was just another fun game on a system that I never expected to compete with an arcade machine.

[Nukey Shay]

crash was in 1984

From a consumer standpoint, it was any year from '82 onward...but it already had begun mid-to-late '81 before either Pac-Man or E.T. had even been released. If neither one of those games had been made (hell, even if Atari disappeared completely overnight), the programmable console market crash still would have happened. The '70s business model everyone was used to no longer worked in the '80s.

 

Topic:

To be regarded as "a flop", production cost cannot be met/surpassed in sales. So it wasn't.

[VectorGamer]

OK - we all know PacMan wasn't a great conversion of the arcade game. But considering it did sell, and sold a ton, can it really be called a "flop"?

 

 

Yes. We knew going in that Pac-Man on the 2600 would've been simplified from the arcade but c'mon - what we got was junk. What I wanted is what Pac-Man Arcade came to be.

[VectorGamer]

 

crash was in 1984

 

Crash started in December of 1982 with the mass sell off of Warner stock.

[Master Phruby]

Back when Pac-man was released we knew exactly what the game would look like and play like. A lot of places had Ataris playing in the stores. We thought Pac-man was great because we didn't know the machine could do much better. It was Pac-man and that is all we cared about and it sold extremely well. How else could it be available today in every single ebay Atari lot. Besides, no one but Atari had Pac-man at the time.Then when Ms. Pac-man came out, it was amazing how much better the game was.

[Mr SQL]

From a consumer standpoint, it was any year from '82 onward...but it already had begun mid-to-late '81 before either Pac-Man or E.T. had even been released. If neither one of those games had been made (hell, even if Atari disappeared completely overnight), the programmable console market crash still would have happened. The '70s business model everyone was used to no longer worked in the '80s.

 

Topic:

To be regarded as "a flop", production cost cannot be met/surpassed in sales. So it wasn't.

Excellent points Nukey. The market was still Atari's; they had a large and active audience and could have kept that wave going longer with more hit releases.

 

I agree Pacman was a hit, selling 7 out of 12 millions copies produced, but the same claims cannot be said for ET with "almost every copy of ET returned" according to Nolan. He may be exaggerating, but that kind of a bomb impacts future sales negatively in the same way a hit single will have a positive impact on the sales of the next album/cartridge.

 

Pacman is still fun today; it' got smooth animation, challenging gameplay (level 6), pleasing colours (BW switch) and a phat retro feel reminiscent of early 80's Pac culture; Pacman fever time - there were pacman lived in watches who could look not even left or right like Atari Pacman but in one direction only - Pacmen were everywhere from little tiny toys with brightly coloured VFD's to the marshmellow pacmen inhabiting cereal

[CatPix]

I don't totally agree on the crash.

The sure thing is that the market was lead by Atari.

 

At least in North America; the game crash didn't get much impact in Europe, where computer were becoming the big thing, with the ZX Spectrum, Oric Atmos, Atari 8 bits then the C64, MSX and Amstrad CPC line (by 1985, when the Vectrex, Colecovision and Intellivision were pulled of the shelves, nobody was caring about them anymore, all the video gaming magazines were talking about the death of game consoles and the 16 bits war starting between the Atari ST and the Amiga).

Hell, Philips even released the Videopac+ which should have been the Odyssey3.

 

Except for Mattel, all the other game system makers were not caring about video games - it was just "the thing to make easy money with". So when the big Atari shot their own foot and ruined the market, they all left.

Mattel could have survived (INTV sold the Intelli as late as 1991 in North America) but they spend too much money in the Keyboard Component and the Adam computer instead of the games, so they pulled the plug here.

 

So, IMO, it wasn't much because of the weird market model than the fact that there was nobody but Atari taking things seriously.

 

I mean, if you look overseas, Europe became the largest micro computer market in the 80's, despite a lot of small brands growing a success and dying right after, a hell of various machines to choose from and a galaxy of crappy games. Still it was healthy and some companies made alot of money from it (most European games companies started programming BASIC games for some osbcure 8 bits computer; and some of them still exist today). All of this because, even if there was also a lot of companies going here only for the money, there was more companies involved in , and more machines, sometime so close that a game could be made working on a dozen machnes with not much tweaking.

And because of the use of cassettes tapes, there was also a lot of piracy going on, which probably had more impact for games companies than rip-off games.

 

So would the crash have happen without ET, Pac Man and Atari? Maybe it wouldn't have been that extreme.

If third parties companies had published their games on other system, rather than rushing it all on Atari, it could have been different.

Edited September 17, 2013 by CatPix

[high voltage]

 

Crash started in December of 1982 with the mass sell off of Warner stock.

That is true, but games for VCS were still selling well in 83, and the 'crash' finally happened in 84 (according to the old mags like EG ), and the C64 took off in early 84.

Edited September 17, 2013 by high voltage

[+save2600]

2600 Pac-Man as a pack-in or otherwise, helped to sell systems. And lots of them. Not too shabby a feat for a "flop".

 

Conversely, I don't remember anyone talking about or even having Pac-Man for their Intellivision. Hell, I didn't even know it existed until the mid 90's when I saw it at a flea market!

[karokoenig]

Wasn't Pac Man the 2600 "pack-in" game for awhile?

 

Here in Germany, it definetly was. I got my Atari x-mas '83, and I got Pac Man with it. I liked it, and I still appreciate it for what it is. The game I played first on my Atari.

 

I was too young to hang out in arcades back then, and I never saw other Pac Man versions before, say, 1985 or so - on the C64.

 

We recently played Pac Man in the 2600 High Score Club. The problem with the game is that there are several patterns you just have to (more or less) memorize, and as soon as you found one of the winning patterns, you could play for as long as you could stay awake without ever dying. As kids, we found that out after a while, so the game got stale. Still, I love the game, for nostalgic reasons. And it's still better than 70 percent of other releases of the time.

[+FujiSkunk]

Oh look, it's this thread again.

 

Pac-Man was not a flop by any of the definitions that usually get bandied about. But since "flop" doesn't have a very strict definition, shoot, you want to call it a flop, you can call it a flop. What you can't call it is a financial failure. Disappointment, sure. I'll even go along with "critical failure that cost Atari some reputation points." But like Atari Punk 78 said, they cried all the way to the bank.

 

Actually, I like to think the critical drubbing Atari received was at least partly responsible for the major upswing in quality we saw in 1982 and 1983. Pac-Man was a disappointment, but Ms. Pac-Man was amazing, as was Centipede, Joust, Moon Patrol, Vanguard and many other arcade conversions released during that time. Not the only reason, sure, but quite plausibly a factor.

 

Of course those improvements ultimately weren't enough to stave off the crash, and the debacle known as E.T. didn't help. But I agree with Nukey. With so many companies trying to jump on the video game bandwagon and so much schlock getting dumped on store shelves, the crash was going to happen no matter how well Atari behaved in the early '80s. The 2600 was just too big and too wide open for those other companies to ignore.

 

I don't totally agree on the crash.

The sure thing is that the market was lead by Atari.

 

At least in North America; the game crash didn't get much impact in Europe, where computer were becoming the big thing, with the ZX Spectrum, Oric Atmos, Atari 8 bits then the C64, MSX and Amstrad CPC line (by 1985, when the Vectrex, Colecovision and Intellivision were pulled of the shelves, nobody was caring about them anymore, all the video gaming magazines were talking about the death of game consoles and the 16 bits war starting between the Atari ST and the Amiga).

 

As was mentioned before, the crash was a home video game crash. The home computer industry also survived in the U.S., as did the arcade industry. Like you said, European gamers generally played more on computers than on game consoles anyway, so the crash wasn't as noticeable there, but then also like you said, the impact was still noticeable, with several consoles disappearing from store shelves.

Edited September 17, 2013 by FujiSkunk

[bomberpunk]

there are too many youngsters who think they know their video game history.

[+5-11under]

All the people I know who had an Atari 2600 all bought Pac-Man. It was the game to have, and their whole families played it for a long time. That's my experience.

[BassGuitari]

I first played Pac-Man on the 2600 in 1999 or 2000, and I loved it.

[JadeETC]

Sarcasm Jade or you serious?

 

I don't think any one game caused the crash. Nor do I think it would've been just PacMan and ET.

 

Wasn't there a flood of cheap, low quality games that contributed? PacMan and ET may be disliked, but I still think at the time both sold, and I'd say there were a lot worse games released by companies looking to cash in on the opportunity.

 

I remember playing ET a lot back then too.

 

Maybe how much you liked PacMan depended on your age, how much you recognized the differences, how often you got to play the real thing... let's see, in 82 I would've been 10 or 11. Getting to an arcade was not something I could easily do. As I said, I was just thrilled to play "PacMan" at home. Maybe someone older would've seen it differently.

Sure, there were other crappier games, but none of the them sold as much as Pac-Man. In fact, many of those lame 3rd party games didn't sell well at all, nor were they distributed very well. Which is why some are so hard to find. No game did as much damage to industry as Pac-Man.

[Brian R.]

Funny how Space Invaders differs so much from the arcade, but is considered a "good game" despite those differences. SI came before Pacman, right?

 

Atari did indeed redeem itself with Ms Pac.

 

And think, if the original PacMan wasn't so bad we wouldn't have people 30 years later still tryingn to make a decent PacMan on the 2600. I wonder what Tod Frye thinks of PacMan 4K - made with the same memory limit he had.

 

And a stray thought that came to me as I type... I wonder why Atari never revisited or updated PacMan for the 2600 themselves.

[akator]

I was disappointed with 2600 Pac-Man 30+ years ago but I played the hell out of it because I only got a new console game every 4-6 months.

 

Over the years my opinion of the game dropped, undoubtedly further influenced by mass cultural and internet influences. Even subconsciously, peer pressure and public opinion affected me. I, too, because to think more poorly of the game over time than I originally did in the 80s.

 

Over the last month I've played it dozens of times... willingly. As a port of the arcade game it sucks, but as a playable maze chomping game for the 2600 it is decent. The sounds are still insanely off-key, but these days it's more amusing than pitiful. I can actually say I have enjoyed playing 2600 Pac-Man for hours in the last month, something I never thought would happen.

[RickR]

Funny how Space Invaders differs so much from the arcade, but is considered a "good game" despite those differences. SI came before Pacman, right?

 

 

Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids were good...they were different than the arcade versions, but close enough in game play -- and were all legitimately fun. My thought is if they would have at least got a few more details right in Pac Man, it too would have been deemed good. And I doubt these are hard changes:

 

- Make the screen black, the maze blue, and the dots white

- Remove they eye from Pac Man

- Make pac man chomp up/down in addition to side to side.

 

Boom, that's all they had to do.

[Brian R.]

I was disappointed with 2600 Pac-Man 30+ years ago but I played the hell out of it because I only got a new console game every 4-6 months.

 

Over the years my opinion of the game dropped, undoubtedly further influenced by mass cultural and internet influences. Even subconsciously, peer pressure and public opinion affected me. I, too, because to think more poorly of the game over time than I originally did in the 80s.

 

Over the last month I've played it dozens of times... willingly. As a port of the arcade game it sucks, but as a playable maze chomping game for the 2600 it is decent. The sounds are still insanely off-key, but these days it's more amusing than pitiful. I can actually say I have enjoyed playing 2600 Pac-Man for hours in the last month, something I never thought would happen.

 

I find the game somewhat interesting and somewhat enjoyable to play.

 

There are a ton of dots or wafers or whatever they are in the maze to clear. The way the maze is constructed and laid out, clearing seems to require a lot of backtracking.

 

Also, the ghosts' size I'd say is an issue - they're too big. Their size makes getting lethally clipped at a corner happen all too often.

 

And Rick - agree with what you said about those few changes making a difference. Makes me think - we've seen Ms Pack hacked in an attempt to make a better PacMan. But has anyone tried tinkering with PacMan itself?

Edited September 18, 2013 by Brian R.

[BillyHW]

Funny how Space Invaders differs so much from the arcade, but is considered a "good game" despite those differences. SI came before Pacman, right?

 

Atari did indeed redeem itself with Ms Pac.

 

And think, if the original PacMan wasn't so bad we wouldn't have people 30 years later still tryingn to make a decent PacMan on the 2600. I wonder what Tod Frye thinks of PacMan 4K - made with the same memory limit he had.

 

And a stray thought that came to me as I type... I wonder why Atari never revisited or updated PacMan for the 2600 themselves.

 

Pac-Man 4k looks like it's the best you could possibly do with that little memory. Quite impressive. Does anyone know how long it took to program?

[high voltage]

The console game industry crashed in 84 because the C64 A8 and Apple 2 took off more due to the move from expensive computer carts to 5 1/4 " games, FD drives became more cheaper and the games looked and played far superior than the console versions. Look at the excellent games from companies like Synapse, EA, Origin, Microprose, Broderbund, Sir Tech, Activision during the 83 /84 period

Edited September 18, 2013 by high voltage

[RickR]

The console game industry crashed in 84 because the C64 A8 and Apple 2 took off more due to the move from expensive computer carts to 5 1/4 " games, FD drives became more cheaper and the games looked and played far superior than the console versions. Look at the excellent games from companies like Synapse, EA, Origin, Microprose, Broderbund, Sir Tech, Activision during the 83 /84 period

And don't forget the impact of piracy.

[Nukey Shay]

the same claims cannot be said for ET with "almost every copy of ET returned" according to Nolan.

Out of context. He was referring to distributer preorders IIRC. E.T. sold well enough in stores (it being nearly as common today as Pac-Man and Combat is evidence of that...and it never was a pack-in).

 

So would the crash have happen without ET, Pac Man and Atari? Maybe it wouldn't have been that extreme.

If third parties companies had published their games on other system, rather than rushing it all on Atari, it could have been different.

It would have turned out more-or-less the same. The VCS wasn't the only console at the time. So how would supposed "negative reception" of those two games or that company translate to bad press for Inty, CV, O2, etc?

 

It doesn't. The boom in console interest which fueled runaway mass-production was fading away, so that is where all the money went. They might have learned something from the non-programmable crash, but they didn't.

 

No game did as much damage to industry as Pac-Man.

Are you including pirated games? Or companies that made nothing BUT trash? The percentage of consumers trying the new thing and then moving along? Or how about just the fact that the parent companies were just draining $millions on their own and consumer interest no longer slowed the leak?

 

I wonder what Tod Frye thinks of PacMan 4K - made with the same memory limit he had.

The same memory limit, but not under the same circumstances (unlimited time, better R&D resources, no company "rulebook" to follow).

 

Makes me think - we've seen Ms Pack hacked in an attempt to make a better PacMan. But has anyone tried tinkering with PacMan itself?

Yes. Have some.

 

Put simply, the game is a collection of aspects implemented poorly. But even that is too strong of a description, I think. Change it to a collection of poor choices that didn't matter much in other popular games.

 

Defender is a prime example. Bad collision-detection, worse object flicker, totally different gameplay strategy than the arcade original. When was the last time you heard that Defender wrecked the VG market?

[Trinity]

The best thing about defender was the grrrl on the box, and how I got it from Atari Age in the mail after being at put-put playing it at the arcade on a nice warm day back in the day.

Edited September 20, 2013 by Trinity