Pac-Man Facts

Transcript
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Did you know?

Pac-Man has influenced the video game industry in profound ways, so much so that even its spin-offs have impacted some of the biggest games in the industry. The arcade platformer Pac-Land actually inspired the original Super Mario Bros. on NES. When Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was asked about Pac-Man spin-offs by Geek Culture, he replied:

“I worked on the sequel ‘Pac-Land’ and ‘Pac-Mania’ and my favorite is ‘Pac-Land’, which is the pioneer of action games with horizontally scrolling backgrounds. Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, who developed ‘Super Mario Bros.’, told me [Super Mario Bros.] was influenced by Namco’s ‘Pac-Land’.” Super Mario Bros.’s immense popularity was in part due to its horizontal scrolling, which might not have appeared in the game if not for Pac-Land. Pac-Land was a hit in its own right and was ported to several home consoles. The NES version of Pac-Land has an unusual control scheme where A and B move Pac-Man left and right, and the D-pad is used to jump. This was to more closely mimic the controls of the arcade release. Interestingly, however, the game does have a traditional control method with the D-pad moving Pac-Man, but this is only accessed by plugging a controller into the second port. Other Pac-Man games have interesting secrets. Pac-Man World has a few Easter eggs such as Pac-Man’s address. The address, “7650”, is actually wordplay that references Namco, the series license holders. 7 can be spoken as “Na”, 6 as “Mu”, and 5 as “Ko”, which results in “Namuko” when put together. In an interview with Pac-Man World designer Scott Rogers, he revealed that some characters’ names have references within them. The name of Toc-Man robots comes from an anagram of “Namcot”, a Namco division that worked on console games from 1984 to 1995. Pac-Man’s influence can also be seen in the competitive world of gaming, and helped start professional gaming as a whole. In fact, some of the earliest Pac-Man high scores even became international news. In 1982, eight-year-old Pac-Man player Jeffrey Yee claimed to have gotten a score of over six million in the game. This score astonished anyone who had played the game, including then president of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan. Reagan sent Jeffrey a letter congratulating him on his high score, but this congratulations may have been premature. Yee’s alleged score of 6,131,930 can only be achieved if the player gets past Level 256, which is a kill screen. For those unaware, a kill screen is a stage in a video game that stops the player’s progress due to a built-in software bug. In the case of Pac-Man, Level 256 is glitched with half the board being a jumbled mess, and may be impossible to pass. This is because the game’s level counter is stored as an 8-bit integer with the highest value being 255. The level counter starts with zero, but this value is read by the game and a one is added for the level counter on screen, meaning the first level is actually Level 0 but is shown as Level 1, and the second level is Level 1 but reads as Level 2, and so on. The game illustrates this value using symbols in the bottom corner of the screen. Because of the overflow, adding one to 255 would be zero, and due to a programming oversight with Level 256, the game calls for far more symbols than usual. These symbols are called up onto the screen, resulting in half the level being filled with a garbled mess of graphical data. But this graphical data doesn’t just obscure the level, it also interferes with the objects within it. Most importantly, the graphical data renders all but nine pellets on the right side uncollectable. For a level to win, the game checks whether Pac-Man has eaten 244 pellets. With the remaining nine pellets on the right side, and the 122 on the left, the player will be 113 short of 244 pellets and unable to progress to the next level, effectively killing the game. The current world record high score in Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points, which was first achieved in 1999. This score, which has since been achieved by many pro Pac-Man players, is often touted as a perfect score by those who believe it’s impossible to get past the game’s 256th level. This is because it requires the player to eat every single pellet, blinking energizer blob, flashing blue ghost, and point-loaded fruit without losing any lives. Scores like Jeffrey Yee’s, which surpassed three-and-a-half million points, require the player to beat Level 256. This is largely the reason why such high scores are seen as suspicious, especially when you consider that no score higher than 3,333,360 has ever been officially documented. According to gaming record tracker Twin Galaxies, professional gamer David W. Race appropriately has the fastest completion time of three hours, twenty-eight minutes, and forty-nine seconds. Pac-Man quickly bred a competitive scene, with competitions popping up all over America. One contest that’s often referred to as the largest was a 1982 Pac-Man tournament in Milwaukee. The tournament had thousands of applicants and was eventually whittled down to eight finalists. The reason this tourney is called the largest isn’t because of the amount of applicants, it’s because the finalists got to play the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man on the jumbo screen at the Milwaukee County Stadium. At the time, it was the largest screen in the United States, being 29 x 63 feet in size and made up of 30,000 forty-watt bulbs. But for as much success and impact the Pac-Man franchise has had, it’s also had a fair amount of failure. Pac-Man World came about after another project (Pac-Man Ghost Zone) was scrapped. Ghost Zone was also a PlayStation platformer being developed by Namco Hometek. This would’ve been the first 3D Pac-Man game to release on home consoles, and got so far into development that it was shown at E3 and even had a box art that appeared in print media. A handful of elements from Ghost Zone were repurposed for Pac-Man World, including the title screen theme. Another scrapped project was Pac-Man Adventures. In 2004, Namco contacted legendary animator Don Bluth to make designs for a new game under the working title “Pac-Man Adventures”. Don did concept art for the game, but it was ultimately cancelled for unknown reasons. Some of the ideas for the game were later used in Pac-Man World 3. Another interesting Pac-Man game that was cancelled is Count Pacula. This was planned as a video game pinball hybrid game set to release in arcades in 1983. The game was similar to Baby Pac-Man, but instead of ghosts, Count Pacula is chased by the Pac-Man family holding wooden stakes. Eating a power pellet would let players bite the Pac-Man family members and turn them grey, which would also make them hunt down and bite other family members. The game was likely cancelled early on due to its subject matter not being very family friendly. Due to the game being developed in 1982, it’s very likely it was based on an episode of the Pac-Man TV show titled “Pacula”, which features a Dracula-inspired Pac-Man. During the spring 2001 Tokyo Game Show, Namco announced that they would be renewing their support for the Bandai WonderSwan. One of the games they announced was a Pac-Man title named “Super GPS Pac-Man”, which would use the Wonder Gate and a GPS add-on to generate a maze based on the player’s location. Pac-Man could explore the maze, which would be filled with objects relevant to the player’s GPS location, such as having cars for enemies if the player was on a road. The project was cancelled for unknown reasons, and the GPS add-on was never released. Another scrapped Pac-Man is Super Pac-Man Pinball, which was planned to release for the Nintendo DS around 2005. It was intended to be a sequel to Pac-Man Pinball Advance for the GBA, and was likely cancelled due to Pinball Advance’s negative critical reception and poor sales. And if you want to destroy us at Pac-Man, you can try and beat our less than glamorous high score of 16,860 on Antstream. If you tweet us a screenshot of your account with a higher score than us on Antstream, we’ll e-submit to your shimmering gaming prowess with a like and a response. To take on this challenge and get 60% off an Antstream Arcade subscription, check out the link at the top of the description and on screen.