The Story of Pacman on Atari 2600 (Retro Gamer Magazine)

[+KaeruYojimbo]

3 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

 

Taking the Art comparison,  it'd be like someone redrawing The Last Supper,using cruder tools, but rearranging the sitting order of the individuals featured and then going..what's the matter? I got everyone in didn't i? 

I'd compare it to translating a poem from one language to another. You could just do a verbatim translation of the words, but the result probably wouldn't be very poetic. To do it well, you need to understand the meaning of the poem and find a way to convey that, even if the words aren't exactly the same, in a way that has a poetic structure. Tod Frye translated the "words" of Pac-Man (maze, dots, ghosts, exits, etc.) but didn't understand the meaning well enough to translate it. Ports like Space Invaders, Missile Command and Moon Patrol express the same meaning as the arcade games, even if some of the words are different.

 

1 hour ago, Mr SQL said:

My favorite ports of Pacman are KC and the Grabber port above, and both are Atari 2600 games.

I already said this in the other thread, but I'll say it again here: KC Munchkin is not a port of Pac-Man. Calling it a port is like calling Sonic the Hedgehog a port of Super Mario Bros. (I'm sure you'll argue that Sonic is a port of SMB though.) KC is inspired by Pac-Man, but it is not meant to be Pac-Man. They're two games of the same genre, using some of the same elements, but they aren't the same game.

 

Had Atari released Pac-Man under a different name, I'd say it's a B-/C+ Pac-Man inspired game. The flickering is obnoxious and the sound effects aren't good, but the gameplay is solid. As a port of Pac-Man, it's an F. It bears no more resemblance to the arcade game than any of the dozens of other Pac-Man style games out there. Less, in fact, than quite a few of them.

[scrummy]

12 hours ago, Random Terrain said:

 

Do you remember the month you got Atari 800 Pac-Man or the first time you remember seeing it in a store? I got an E-mail saying that it was impossible for for me and my mother to have played Atari computer Pac-Man before Atari 2600 Pac-Man was released. I don't want to OCD on it, but that's a major fuzzy memory for two people to share. I might make a new thread about it in the Atari computer forum.

I do remember seeing that Strange box design in the store, it was the computer section of a department store in Mobile Al. I really can't place the time or date, but I do remember it being in the same time that my friend Mike got 2600 PacMan.  I wasn't on any bulletin boards at the time. It does seem like Compute or some magazine would have reviewed it around release, maybe that could provide some better date evidence.  

[scrummy]

6 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

Tod did create something of a rod for his own back in that article, when he talked of wanting to capture the ethos, the soul as it were of Pac-Man and he honestly intended his version to be as faithful a representation as he deemed possible and necessary.. 

 

But has admitted the decision to make the maze colours different from that of the arcade version was his and to this day, he still doesn't get why his simplified maze layout with the exits on the top and bottom of the screen, not the sides, causes so much anger amongst Pac-Man fans.

 

 

If you start out by saying you basically did everything you could to replicate the Coin-Op within the limits of the primitive 2600 hardware, but then switch to an attitude of something like, so I changed the maze colours and moved the exits, so what?

 

Your heading for trouble as clearly you looked at the game from the standpoint of an engineer, not a gamer. 

 

I never felt he really understood Asteroids either,  the Atari 8-bit version i personally found worse the 2600 version.

 

Gameplay seemed very, very dull,but again here Tod had ticked the boxes, you had big space rocks, spaceships etc.

 

You find similar issues on far later arcade conversions to far more powerful home systems, coders simply given a project and a deadline and years later say they had previously never played the original or if they had, were not fans of it, so i am not singling Tod out.

 

 

I just really struggle to believe he really understood what the appeal of Pac-Man was to so many of us.

 

To capture something, you need to study and fully understand it's essence.

 

I don't see that with Tod converting Asteroids or Pac-Man.

 

The f##k the press line was a bit stupid of him as well.

 

Given the price of 2600 and A8 games here in the UK, the press was all we had to guide us.

 

If you came from a working class background where money was tight and you could only afford to treat your child on special occasions, you were thankful there were people out there trying to steer you in the right direction when it came to purchasing choices.

I was disappointed with Atari 800 Asteroids.  Left me with nothing but giant round Blue Asteroid balls floating around a dull lifeless green ship. What the hell Todd!, damn, now that I think more about it, maybe I do want to kick him in the balls.  (sorry I seem to have posted this with the wrong quote. edited to say this)

Edited January 23, 2020 by scrummy

[Lost Dragon]

Going sideways just for a moment,  clones of popular Arcade titles on the 8 bit home micros, could often be as good as, if not better than, the official conversions back then.

 

Defender and Mr Do! being 2 prime examples:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do we have any idea how much time Tod spent playing the arcade version of Pac-Man before and during the conversion?. 

 

 

I'm afraid i don't have much sympathy with the 6 months he was given to convert it, Chris Butler only had 6 weeks to convert Space Harrier to the C64.

 

Impossible deadlines have sadly blighted commercial games development for as long as i can remember. 

 

 

 

[Lost Dragon]

3 minutes ago, scrummy said:

I was disappointed with Atari 800 Asteroids.  Left me with nothing but giant round Blue Asteroid balls floating around a dull lifeless green ship. What the hell Todd!, damn, now that I think more about it, maybe I do want to kick him in the balls.  (sorry I seem to have posted this with the wrong quote. edited to say this)

Not just myself then?

 

This is perhaps why i would of taken a different approach personally, had it been myself putting Q's to Todd.

 

I'd of had to of asked what exactly happened when he was tasked with doing arcade conversions as leaving hardware limitations and Atari Manager interference aside, having played his conversions,  to myself there was the fundamental failure to really understand the inner workings of what had made the original Arcade titles so compelling, to so many.

 

 

I could stomach concessions on the audio and visual side of things, sprite flicker didn't dissappear with the Master System etc, even Amiga Pac-Mania suffered from it, if my memory serves me well :-)) 

 

C64 Operation Wolf had Lego-esq graphics,but the feel of the game was retained. 

 

Todd's approach just felt exactly that of an engineers mindset..cold, straight logic. 

 

For all his talk of attempting to  capture the soul, it never felt that way playing the fruits of his labours.

[+KaeruYojimbo]

Continuing my poetry analogy (I thought of this while waiting at the bank, and I'm gonna put it somewhere, dammit!)

 

The original arcade Pac-Man is an Italian sonnet about the author's first love.

 

The Atari 8-Bit port is a translation to English by someone who is fluent in Italian and understands poetry. Some things had to be rearranged a little, but it expresses the same meaning and maintains the sonnet structure.

 

The Atari 2600 port is an English translation by someone who doesn't speak Italian and has never read a poem in his life. He just went through it word by word with an English-Italian dictionary, ignoring poetic structure, underlying meaning and even the syntactic differences between the two languages. Whenever someone tells him his translation isn't very good, he yells "F@$& you! It's a perfect translation!"

 

KC Munchkin is a free-verse poem in German, written after the author read the original sonnet and was inspired to write about his own first love. There are some thematic similarities, but it is in no way a translation of the original.

[zzip]

24 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

Going sideways just for a moment,  clones of popular Arcade titles on the 8 bit home micros, could often be as good as, if not better than, the official conversions back then.

 

Defender and Mr Do! being 2 prime examples:

I would add "Donkey Kong" to that list.  The 8-bit computer version has all four levels, and arguably plays better than the CV version.

Edited January 23, 2020 by zzip

[jhd]

4 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

I already said this in the other thread, but I'll say it again here: KC Munchkin is not a port of Pac-Man. Calling it a port is like calling Sonic the Hedgehog a port of Super Mario Bros. (I'm sure you'll argue that Sonic is a port of SMB though.) KC is inspired by Pac-Man, but it is not meant to be Pac-Man. They're two games of the same genre, using some of the same elements, but they aren't the same game.

 

At least one judge of the US Federal District Court disagrees with you:

 

Quote

Undaunted, a few months later [in 1981], Atari brought a lawsuit in Illinois against North American Philips Consumer Electronics

Corp. (the developers of the Magnavox Odyssey 2). Once again, the subject matter was a Pac-Man clone – “K. C.
Munchkin”. The programmer of that game was Ed Averett.

The Court found that there were some differences between the two games. K. C. Munchkin, for example had “several
modes with an almost indefinite variety of mazes. One mode, for example, employs a constantly changing
configuration, […] and in yet another, the maze disappears when the gobbler moves.” Other aspects of the game,
however, especially the character graphics and animation, had blatantly similar features.

After a very detailed comparison of the two games, and a lengthy analysis of the law, the Court held that K. C.
Munchkin infringed Atari’s copyright, and so it ordered Magnavox to immediately cease production of the game.

 

Source: http://www.classicplastic.net/trt/arclegacy/RTM-Standard/RetrogamingTimesMonthly-100.zip

(I do not have the original legal citation handy; I can find it if anyone really cares)

 

 

Edited January 23, 2020 by jhd
to fix the formatting

[Mr SQL]

8 hours ago, jhd said:

I'm sure you'll argue that Sonic is a port of SMB though...

I think it has "blatantly similar features" like KC but extends the genre, also like KC.