Pac-Man

Pac-Man has been a part of the world of gaming for me for as long as I can remember. Back to my earliest memories on the PS1, I had access to a port of Pac-Man as part of the Namco Museum collection, and some time after that I got Pac-Man World 2 for PS2. In the years since I've gawked at grainy YouTube footage of Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, sunk countless hours into Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX and far fewer into Pac-Man: Championship Edition 2, and wasted some time with Pac-Man 256. Namco's most recognizable mascot has been such a constant presence for me that I've often taken him for granted; when I came upon his first game on my backlog, it had been many, many years since I last touched it in any form unadulterated by modern concessions, graphical overhauls, or entirely new gameplay formats built around it, so long in fact that I could scarcely be said to have had much of an opinion on it at all, viewing it from such a temporal and historical distance. In my mind, Pac-Man wasn't so much a game as a piece of cultural iconography, along the lines of a Mickey Mouse or a Joe Camel. A Snoopy. A Garfield. A Hatsune Miku. Hell, I'm pretty sure its quartet of ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde) were my first introduction to the classic comedic trope of a group of 4 characters, 3 of whom carry a two-syllable name following a particular auditory theme, while the 4th has a one-syllable name that breaks from the theme with a slightly anticlimactic and provincial ring to it. This is a trope I'd go on to reference myself, when playing the PSP port of Final Fantasy with my all-monk meme team: Bingus, Bangus, Bongus, and Spud. The rhythms and aesthetics of this game have been so thoroughly ingrained in my mind through constant exposure that for years I was scarcely aware of their influence.

In loading up a ROM of the original arcade cabinet on MAME and playing it with my HORI Real Arcade Pro 4 Kai connected to my desktop via USB, I reconnected with this fixture with fresh eyes, and I'm glad I did. Pac-Man has a reputation for having put video games on the map with a pretty wide audience, due in large part to the ways it broke convention. The game isn't particularly violent, putting at ease all but the most strident of pearl-clutchers. Instead it's abstract and cartoony, inviting in those who were put off by the nerdy spaceship theming of early shmups and flight sims. The main character is a simple yellow circle with a charming mouth flapping open and shut, pursued by multicolored ghosts as he eats his way through the dots dropped around a maze. All the graphics stand out beautifully against the black background, and the cacophony of computer beeps and boops which emanate from the machine are instantly captivating and iconic. A steady, staccato rhythm as Pac-Man eats small dots, high-pitched sirens when he nabs a Power Pellet, a deep, satisfying bwoop as he eats a fruit. The whole thing is bright and poppy, colorful and inviting, especially compared with earlier black and white vector games. On top of all this, it features dead simple core mechanics. Any onlooker can tell in moments what's going on; you run through the maze, avoiding ghosts and collecting dots and fruits, unless you get a big dot, in which case you have a limited window in which to turn the ghosts' aggression back around on them. Outside of the start buttons, the entirety of the control scheme is contained within a single joystick, you just point it where you want to go. Everything else is done via that movement in direct and intuitive ways, anyone can pick it up and play it.

All of that gets a foot in the door, one singular quarter pressed through the slot. The final piece of the puzzle is what it takes to get people to keep coming back for more. The depth and longevity of the game is provided by ghost behavior that squeezes lots of dynamism and unpredictability out of a pretty simple set of rules. Much ink has been spilled over the Pac-Man ghost AI, so I won't spend too much time on it here, but suffice to say that each ghost has its own simplistic, but unique, routine: It targets a space at a particular relative position to the player, attempts to reach that space for some time, then switches to patrolling a designated corner of the maze for a brief time before returning to its previous goal. Each of the ghosts tries to approach Pac-Man from a different angle, and in so doing they become imbued with varying personalities. Blinky is a dogged pursuer, Pinky somewhat less so, Inky is crafty and liable to catch you in a trap, and Clyde is, well, a bit dumb. All of this comes through just in their basic game behavior! It's really quite impressive, and makes avoidance into a complex, multifaceted challenge.

This is bolstered by the ways that the player relates to the environment this chase is happening in. You quickly begin to avoid long unbroken straightaways, as they present perfect opportunities for ghosts to hem you in, and start to value the warps, which not only allow you to completely reposition to the opposite side of the stage, but also give you a sizable head start on any ghosts who follow you in, as they move through the warps much more slowly than you. Eventually it will become apparent that you move slightly more slowly when eating dots than when traversing already-cleared paths; and so, you begin to develop conflicting gradients of the value and safety of various territories. Sections of maze which contain dots bring you closer to completing the level, but put you at greater risk. Once you clear them out, they become empty and worthless in terms of progression, but invaluable as avenues of escape. The warps are empty from the beginning, at no point do they ever offer anything other than a way to put distance between yourself and the ghosts, but it's a role they serve with aplomb. These relative risks and rewards come to dominate your thought process throughout the game, accentuated by the addition of fruits which only ever appear in the dot-less center of the maze for a short time and offer large point payouts. Initially they may seem negligible to the casual player, a bonus only valuable to score fiends, but much like Galaxian, Pac-Man doles out extra lives at certain point thresholds. As such, the canny player will always be searching for ways not just to survive for the present moment, but to maximize point intake to best ensure their continued survival moving forward. The same calculus applies when utilizing power pellets; While, in early levels, you can squeeze a longer period of safety out of each pellet by refraining from eating the ghosts, in short order the game's ascending difficulty will shorten the powerup's active time period to such a degree that a dead ghost will take longer to recover its body than a living one will to cease flashing, and on top of that, each consecutive ghost eaten on a single pellet provides an exponentially larger point payout, culminating in 1600 for the fourth. Should you consume all four ghosts on a single pellet, your total point reward for doing so totals out to 3,000, a significant portion of the 10,000 needed for your first 1up. The message is clear: excellent play which maximizes points isn't simply impressive, it directly extends your survivability. If you wish see the later levels, you'll need to deftly juggle your goals of eating every dot, avoiding capture by ghosts, and maximizing your score, three goals which are frequently at odds and have varied time pressures applied to them.

Aside from the core gameplay, we're also starting to see some interesting evolutions from Namco's previous work on Galaxian. Once you clear a screen, all the walls flash for a moment before it loads the next one, which stands in stark contrast to Galaxian silently and abruptly repopulating the wall of enemies you just cleared. Really everything about Galaxian's progression feels unceremonious next to Pac-Man, which will play jingles when you start the game, flash the screen when you complete a stage, and occasionally even give you little barebones scenes made by moving the sprites around between levels, set to music. The whole thing feels downright luxuriant in its presentation, the colors and sounds coming together to convey an aesthetic richness that earlier games were just starting to gesture toward.

Taken altogether, the top-notch presentation, accessible but challenging gameplay, and abstract, univeral theming leave little wonder why this particular cabinet took the world by storm. Anyone would be attracted by its siren call in the corner of a bar or on the wall of an arcade, and once they'd put that first quarter in, they'd find plenty to keep them hooked. Pac-Man truly lives up to its reputation, standing as a titan among its arcade contemporaries.