Pac-Man (Atari 2600 video game)

The player uses a joystick to control Pac-Man, navigating him through a maze of consumable dashes called video wafers, opposed by a quartet of multi-colored ghosts. The goal of the game is to earn a high score by having Pac-Man eat video wafers, power pills, vitamins and ghosts. Every time Pac-Man eats all the video wafers in the maze, he earns an extra life and a new maze full of wafers. A group of ghosts roam the maze, trying to eat Pac-Man. If one touches Pac-Man, he loses a life. Near the corners of the maze are four larger, flashing consumables known as Power Pills that turn the ghosts a blue transparent colour and give Pac-Man the temporary ability to eat the ghosts and earn points. Setting the console's A–B difficulty switches can also handicap one or both players. If the switch is set to A position, the power pills' effects do not last as long. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 has various changes from the original game. The game no longer features collectible items such as fruits or the key, which are now replaced by an orange box called the vitamin. The game also lacks the cutscenes and sounds from the arcade version. The game has a different maze than the arcade game. The maze is simplified in structure and appearance, lacking the rounded edges and intricate passages of the arcade, and the escape passages at the sides are moved to the top and bottom. ==Development==

After Pac-Man proved to be a success in the United States, Atari decided to license the game and port it to its Atari 2600 console (known at the time as the Atari Video Computer System). Programming was assigned to Tod Frye, who was not provided with any arcade design specifications to work from and had to figure out how the game worked by playing it. Frye spent 80-hour weeks over six months developing it. The finished game uses a 4 KB ROM cartridge, chosen for its lower manufacturing costs compared to 8 KB bank-switched cartridges, which had recently become available. To deal with these limitations, Frye simplified the maze's intricate pattern of corridors to a more repetitive pattern. The small tan pellets in the arcade original were changed to rectangular "wafers" that shared the color of the wall; this change was necessitated because both the pellets and walls were drawn with the 2600's Playfield graphics, which have a fixed width. To achieve the visual effect of wafers disappearing as Pac-Man eats them, the actual map of the maze was updated as the data was written into the Playfield registers, excluding the pellets that had been eaten. The 2600's Player-Missile graphics system (sprites) was used for the remaining objects; the one-bit-wide Missiles were used to render the flashing power pills and the center of the vitamin. Pac-Man and ghost characters were implemented using the 2600's two Player objects, with one being used for Pac-Man and the other being used for all four ghosts; as a result, each ghost only appears once out of every four frames. This creates a flickering effect that takes advantage of the slow phosphorescent fade of CRT monitors and the concept of persistence of vision, resulting in the image appearing to linger on screen longer; Frye chose to abandon plans for a flicker-management system to minimize the flashing in part because Atari didn't seem to care about that issue in its zeal to have the game released. According to Frye, his game also did not conform to the arcade game's color scheme in order to comply with Atari's official home product policy that only space-type games should feature black backgrounds. Another quality impact was his decision that two-player gameplay was important, which meant that the 23 bytes required to store the current difficulty, the state of the dots on the current maze, remaining lives, and the score had to be doubled for a second player, consuming 46 of the 2600's meager 128-byte memory, which precluded its use for additional game data and features. Oft-repeated stories claim that Atari wanted to or did release a prototype in order to capitalize on the 1981 holiday season; ==Release==

To help sales, Atari promoted and protected its exclusive licensing of Pac-Man by taking legal action against companies that released similar clones. However, Atari failed to stop other games such as On-Line Systems' Jawbreaker and Gobbler. Several retailers assisted Atari with the release of the game, such as JCPenney, who became the first retailer to launch a nationwide advertising campaign on television for a software title. Atari, continuing a long-standing relationship with Sears, also produced Pac-Man cartridges under the department store's label. Atari's Pac-Man was re-released as downloadable content for the Atari 50 (2022) video game compilation in November 2025 and re-released on a physical cartridge as part of a Pac-Man double-pack for their Atari 2600+ system. ==Reception==

Sales Anticipation for the game was high. Goldman Sachs analyst Richard Simon predicted the sale of 9 million units during 1982, which would yield a profit of $200 million. It was the best-selling home video game of 1982, with over cartridges sold that year and over ( adjusted for inflation) in gross revenue. It replaced Space Invaders as the best-selling Atari 2600 title and also became the overall best-selling video game up until then (a title it held for several years until eventually being surpassed by Nintendo's Super Mario Bros.) Pac-Man also propelled sales of the Atari 2600 to units by 1982. Frye reportedly received $0.10 in royalties per copy. Purchases of the game had slowed by the summer of 1982, with unsold copies available in large quantities. for a total of over cartridges sold by 1990. By 2004, the cartridges were still very common among collectors and enthusiasts—though the Sears versions were rarer—and priced lower. Video Magazine admitted it was "challenging, and there are a few visual pluses", before lamenting, "Unfortunately those who cannot evaluate Pac-Man through lover's eyes are likely to be disappointed." The premiere issue of Video Games Player from Fall 1982 called the port "just awful". Video Games Player magazine gave the graphics and sound its lowest rating of C, while giving the game an overall B− rating. Electronic Fun with Computers & Games gave it an overall B− rating, with a C rating for graphics. The New York Times wrote in October that "though word-of-mouth on the game has not been considered great, the cartridge is still selling" because of Pac-Mans fame. In 1983, Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games reviewer Danny Goodman said that the game fails as a replica of its arcade form: "Atari stated clearly in its description of the cartridge that Atari's Pac-Man 'differs slightly from the original'. That, perhaps, was an understatement." Conversely, he stated that such criticism was unfair because the hardware of the Atari 2600 could not properly emulate the arcade game. Goodman further said that the port is a challenging maze game in its own right, and it would have been a success if fans had not expected to play a game closer to the original. while Softline questioned why Atari opposed Pac-Man clones when the 2600 version was less like the original "than any of the pack of imitators". The game has remained poorly rated. Computer and Video Games magazine rated the game 57% in 1989. Next Generation magazine editors in 1998 called it the "worst coin-op conversion of all time", and attributed the mass dissatisfaction to its poor quality. Another IGN editor, Levi Buchanan, described it as a "disastrous port", citing the color scheme and flickering ghosts. Skyler Miller of AllGame said that although the game was only a passing resemblance to the original, it was charming despite its many differences and faults. ==Impact and legacy==

Initially, the excitement generated by Pac-Mans home release prompted retail stores to expand their inventory to sell video games. Drugstores began stocking video game cartridges, and toy retailers vied for new releases. Kmart and JCPenney competed against Sears to become the largest vendor of video games. In retrospect, however, critics often cite Atari's Pac-Man as a major factor in the drop of consumer confidence in the company, which contributed to the video game crash of 1983. Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Gamasutra stated that the game's poor quality damaged the company's reputation. Former Next Generation editor-in-chief Neil West attributes his longtime skepticism of Atari's quality to the disappointment he had from buying the game as a child. Montfort and Bogost stated that the game's negative reception seeded mistrust in retailers, which was reinforced by later factors that culminated in the crash. Immediately following the announcement, the company's stock value dropped by around 35%—from $54 to $35—amounting to a loss of $1.3 billion in the company's market valuation. Warner admitted that Pac-Mans good sales despite poor quality made Atari overconfident about E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which did not sell well. In 1983, the company decreased its workforce by 30% and lost $356 million. It was followed by conversions of Pac-Mans arcade sequels, Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man, for the Atari 2600. These used 8 KB ROM cartridges instead of Pac-Man's 4 KB and dispensed with two-player games. They were better received than Atari's first Pac-Man title and addressed many critics' complaints. == See also ==