For fans of retro games, Pac-Man is nothing short of iconic—a game so loved it’s been ported to nearly every console imaginable. But the Atari 2600 version, released in 1982, left players scratching their heads – as laid out in a video by [Almost Something]. Atari had licensed Pac-Man to ride the wave of its arcade success, but the home version, programmed solely by [Todd Fry], missed the mark, turning an arcade icon into a surprising lesson in over-ambitious marketing.
Despite the hype, [Fry] faced an almost impossible task: translating Pac-Man’s detailed graphics and complex gameplay to the Atari’s limited 4 K cartridge with only 128 bytes of RAM. Atari’s strict limitations on black backgrounds and its choice to cut costs by sticking with a 4 K cartridge left the game barely recognizable. The famous pellet-chomping maze became simpler, colors were changed, and the iconic ghosts—reduced to single colors—flickered constantly. And then, Atari went all in, producing twelve million copies, betting on the success of universal appeal. In a twist, Pac-Man did sell in record numbers (over seven million copies) but still fell short of Atari’s expectations, leaving millions of unsold cartridges eventually dumped in a New Mexico landfill.
This debacle even kind of marked Atari’s 1983 decline. Still, Pac-Man survived the hiccup, evolving and outlasting its flawed adaptation on the 2600. If you’re interested in learning more about the ins and outs of game ports, check out the fantastic talk [Bob Hickman] gave during Supercon 2023.
I forgot this was in vertical format, what a squish to horizontal. Long before the even taller cellphone vids of now. Nobody was going to turn their TV console on it’s side or put up with dead screen area, so squish it.
The flickering “ghosts”, ha!
IIRC the 2600 only had two sprites, and one would have been the player, leaving one sprite for all the ghosts. So the sprite was moved between frames for each ghost in succession, hence the “ghostly” (ghastly?!) flicker!
The Atari-computer version was excellent. The change in orientation didn’t turn out to be bothersome.
Forgot to mention Todd was kind of an ass. He posted a copy of the $1M check Atari wrote him for rushed development to his office door.
Source?
Anybody remember the PC knockoff called “PC-Man”? It was made by a very small company in Alabama. I met the owner once in college. Can’t remember too many details about it, but he showed me a copy running on his PC in his office, and it looked outstanding!
Tod Frye was his name. Atari forced him to program the game on 4K ROMs and Atari’s golden rule for black backgrounds was for space only games. He got $0.10 per-cartage and 12 Million copies were made so he got a million bucks.
On the one hand, fitting that game into 4K ROM and 128B RAM was no small achievement. But who on earth at Atari saw that and thought ‘Yup, that’s fine, ship it!’?
The upper managements who wanted money, not quality
My cousins had it. We played it.
“Puck wha!” was our approximation of the sound eating ghosts made.
The PC version by Atarisoft wasn’t exactly great, either.
»In fact, of all Atarisoft PC conversions, this was one of the more shoddy ones as the maze’s proportions are out of whack.
In addition, the programmer was lazy–the entire maze is drawn with the INT 10 set pixel function, which is why it’s so slow.«
https://www.mobygames.com/game/138/pac-man/trivia/
To be fair, though, it was made by Namco.
Not sure how much Atarisoft was involved in the work.
Just strange that Atarisoft was fine with it quality wise.
Catchem on CP/M machines was much better even though it only used alphanumeric characters.
I didn’t get the fuss. Even being children at that time we were aware of the limitations of the console and have fun anyway, after all we were in home playing with our brothers and friends without spending any money. It’s a completely different perspective.
Yeah, my tight-fistedness kept me out of video arcades back then!
Well take a look at the box the cartridge came in. Gave you just enough hope that it was true. Only to donkey kick one’s tiny pubesent balls. Kinda like the x-ray goggles one would buy from back page comic book/pop sci adverts.
i agree with Danjovic different perspective and I’ll go further in terms of rhetoric of big bad corporations. It’s what teachers tell kids of next generations. Facts were this in terms of the money aspect of it. There were limitations to the games because of the technology at the time. Also, we all as kids at the time spent fortunes with quarters at arcades and this Atari stuff saved our parents money and we were all entertained even though the quality was not the same as the arcade. The developer wasn’t mistreated either . Lol What’s wrong with… They all made a lot of money from the success of keeping us kids at the time entertained. The story about the landfill is a urban legend. It was never proven. However all of this makes for good story telling which should be presented in that context. Example. It’s was said. They believed. Lol.
Never proven? I suggest you watch this. It is on youtube too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari:_Game_Over
K.C. Munchkin for the Odyssey² was a better PAC-Man than the Atari port. It was pulled from the market after a lawsuit over its similarity.
+1
It also was popular here in Europe, on Videopac and Videopac+ console.
It was cartridge no. 38, I think. Munchkin had a few other names over here.
There also was a sequel, Crazy Chase, cartridge no. 44.
The German title basically translated to “revenge of Munchkin” in response to the lawsuit.
I wonder how Ms Pacman was able to do it so much better?
Anyway, another aspect to the 2600 Pac-Man iteration was that its sound effects were recycled countless times for various television shows.
Ms. Pac-Man rom was 8KB, I guess that made a big difference.
I also guess that Atari learned from the Pac-Man experience and tried to save some of their losses.
To be honest, I didn’t care at all that Pac-Man on the 2600 was so different from the arcade version. The gameplay was almost the same, the Atari game felt like Pac-Man. And obviously at the time I already realised that a home game console’s hardware cannot be compared to that of a real arcade machine. So we just accepted that it looked differently, and still thought that the game was great to play.
I was a kid when this game came out for the Atari 2600 and I couldn’t wait! I had many games for the system and if you just look at the 2600 version and just look at at the arcade today of course it makes sense, BUT as someone who again was lucky enough to grow up in this era you knew you were not getting arcade quality. To this day, I love this version of Pac-man. I loved being able to play at home and the limited system made it challenging. I have seen newer versions that people have made for the 2600 that look better but I will always prefer the original.
For people at this time who bought 2600s just for the game, even as a kid I knew they would be dissapointed and of course they were. I agree Atari went all in and over board with this game but it’s hard to describe how popular Pac-man was back then. I remember my Mom who has never played video games wanted to try the arcade version because her friends were talking about it. Like non nerds so called normal people were talking about a video game at a water cooler (see Wikipedia for what a water cooler is)!
I vaguely recall someone released a copy of Packman (don’t remember if it was a download or a magazine CD) But the fun thing was that you could easily swap all of the sounds out for something in a wav file. Not a lot of space allotted for the sounds, So you had to use less than audiophile grade bit rates. IIRC windows audio recorder worked just fine to grab sounds.
We had a silly good time inserting our own screams or else some rather puerile noise choices.
This and swapping out the bitmap images in Windows “Pipes” screensaver.
There was a finished prototype Atarisoft developed for Colecovision that would’ve given the 5200 version a run for the money had it been released.
Terrible as it may have been, as a 7 year old kid I had no idea it was a poor imitation, and loved that game. I still have it in my attic and recently played it again on the modern 2600.
The fact that you could have a game system at home that could play even laughable imitations of arcade games was big. I can remember trashing how Atari 2600 Pac-Man looked and played compared to the arcade version, but we still played it fir hours on end.
My brothers and I used to play this on the Sears knockoff of the 2600 with my mom and grandmother. We learned the pattern to play through the maze. It never changed. At that point, it just became a game of attrition. One slip up and she’d take you down. However craptastic it may have been, we had a blast. It’s some of my fondest memories, plus you got to go to school and brag about how well your grandmother played Pac-man. Awesome.
Sears console is not a knockoff, it is official Atari with Sears branding, just so you know.
Cool. I didn’t know that. I can’t imagine a company doing that today. We had a lot of fun with it. My earliest repairs were on the broken joysticks. The plastic on the inside around the frame area that would contact the buttons would break eventually because, as everyone knows, the harder you pushed, the faster the could move. Anyway, they’d crack and before long I’d be scavenging plastic and my dad’s soldering iron to weld them back together again. Ready for another game of Megamania.
I recall skimming a book about how to win at Pac-Man, yes, as you mentioned, it was a pattern through the maze with pauses.
I remember getting ready on release day in 1982, with my Mom gathering my brother and I to pile into the car to drive to Sears to buy a copy…my parents were both “gamers” long before the term was coined…
In 1976 I was born into a home that had a couple different early consoles (pong and similar).
The Atari console was always on the TV around the time of pacman being released. TV game shows displayed it as a prize with Space Invaders on show. Mail order catolgues too showed off the limited games machine. Listing lots of games with detailed images of the cartridge covers. Dynamic artwork filled with detailed spaceships, eager sportsman, Warzones and the like. As a child I was hooked. Not knowing of course that the actual games themselves were far from anything portrayed on the cover. Blocks, stickmen and other 2 colour graphics that barely grabbed your attention
I just wanted to mention that even these days, there are still people who are improving Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. Someone recreated the game in 8KB:
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/229152-new-pacman-for-atari-2600/page/60/#comment-4131166
A video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9DvvZLloMM
And Tod himself had a few things to say about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqezF_Lv05Y