This version looked and played as close as you could get without hauling an arcade machine in your house, right down to the speed and behavior of the four different ghosts travelling through the mazes. And it's clear that the company's focus was on absolute accuracy. So, while we had to put up with substandard ports in the US, Namco brought forth its own arcade conversion on the Famicom system in 1984. Close, but still not quite the same experience. The 2600 version was flat-out awful, but it was the closest we could get at home.until the company put out the Atari 5200 and Atari XL editions. Rather, it just wanted to be known as the company with the rights to Pac-Man. See, all the home conversions of Pac-Man were secured by Atari, and even if the hardware could pull off the game, the company wasn't really set on accuracy. Finally! No more going to the arcades and wasting our hard-earned quarters.we can get the same experience at home. That's really special.Back when we game editors were getting Atari 2600 under our Christmas trees, the one game everyone got in 1981 was the first home conversion of the arcade game. The game rolled over back to level 1 again. When Pacman was rewritten, level 256 could finally be completed and WHAT HAPPENED THEN!!? Did the planets align? World Peace? The Holy Grail? No. Supposedly the level has never been beaten! Until. It became so popular that Billy Mitchell of Florida (the first guy to get a "perfect Pacman score" which is: 3,333,360 points) offered anyone $100,000 if they could beat the split screen level. However, the left remained intact which led to the nickname for this level as "The Split Screen Level" (see video below). In Pacman this meant that the right side of the screen became jarbled. Talk To Me Like I'm A 3 Year Old Version: The game can't handle numbers bigger than 255.Īnyways, if you get to level 256 the data can't handle it and funky things start to happen. Naturally, the biggest number formed with 2 digits in our decimal system is of course 99. Naturally the maximum hex that could be formed would be FF or 255 (remember in Zelda how you could only get 255 rupies?). Data was commonly stored as a byte which could hold two hexadecimal digits. 0-9 followed by A-F which adds up to 16 digits. This led to a hexadecimal system for video game data instead of decimal. The goal was always to use as little as possible. Nerd Version: See at the dawn of video games, everything was about memory. Atari came after this.ĭoesn't it just piss you off when you play Pacman for 17 straight hours and you get to level 256 and the screen is all messed up? Yeah I never got by level 10 myself but if you're in that 1% of 1% who actually made it this far or if you just want to know where this is going, then read on. Keep in mind that we're talking Arcades here not consoles. It caught everyone by surprise and even the so called experts overlooked Pac-Man while reviewing arcade games (don't the experts always do things like that?). Renamed to Pac-Man in the US, it became an instant hit. Nobody had ever seen a game like it before. Namco and Iwatani may have developed "Puck Man" in Japan, but it was Midway who marketed to the United States and saw sales fly through the roof. Strangely enough, it was NOT a big success after launch. After a short 18 months, the game was complete and launched as "Puck Man". This odd sounding name (odd only because it's not English of course) is symbolic of the noise made when one opens and closes their mouth rapidly. Iwatani drew inspiration for his game via a famous Japanese phrase known as "Paku-Paku Taberu". Toru Iwatani designed the game over the short time of 18 months (yeah back then one guy could write a game on his own, imagine that today?). The company Namco gets the credit for developing the most popular arcade game of all time.
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