Pac Man 2600

[Jeff-20]

I honestly don't think Atari 2600's version of Pac Man was bad. Ok, it's not great if you compare it to the arcade, but if it didn't have the Pac Man license to be for such a comparison, it wouldn't be such a bad game on its own. Just play it without thinking of it as a port.

[highinfidelity]

Agree. Most kids were very happy with it at the times. It was considered normal - at the time - that ported games only vaguely resembled to the arcade originals, and people seemed to be more conscious than they are today that the household hardware had limits. It was still considered normal to see things in black & white - go figure!

People today is pulling miracles out of a tiny (although awesome) machine as the 2600 is, and they leave me open-mouthed most of the times and I take my hat off in front of their skills. But these games are mostly created with cross-platform programming, and most of them use memory expansions and bankswitching. I'm not blaming this attitude, I just say that all these things didn't exist back then and memory was outrageously costly. So it really can't be compared what was programmed back then, with the machines and softwares then available, with what is being programmed today.

The 2600 is a dream-machine if you want to program Combat or Pong: two small moving sprites used as targets and a "ball" moving all around the screen. Everything else is basically a nightmare, and what the machine was actually able to do had to be discovered on the way and was, obviously, undocumented as even the engineers themselves had no idea of how far the final frontier of the hardware was. It's no joke to affirm that today's impressive homebrews are the result of 35 years (!!!) of continuous IT research on the field performed by an international team of very skilled programmers. So I think that comparing these recent homebrews with what was made back then is at least unfair.

[orion70]

Your argument is absolutely valid for all 8-bit machines, including the beloved one .

Everyone here at Denial thought at least once: what if the VIC possibilities were exploited to the maximum, and something like the recent ports of Pacman, Frogger, Doom, Tetris, Pooyan, Trailblazer, or Pitfall (to name a few) came out thirty years ago? It would have been an absolute blast to the market, and it's not utopia to think that the C-64 overcome would have been postponed, or it wouldn't have happened at all.

But then again, today we have cross-platform programming tools, we can compare ports on different (later) machines, and last but not least maybe there are even better programmers compared to the 80s guys, in that they know every nook and cranny of the 6502. Look at the demoscene for example.

So yes, we're all spoiled like little babies, and cannot be content of our pixelated classic heroes anymore .

[highinfidelity]

and last but not least maybe there are even better programmers compared to the 80s guys, in that they know every nook and cranny of the 6502. Look at the demoscene for example.

Sure, correct, but most of all they work on spare time with absolutely no deadline, no outgoings headroom, and living on a completely different job. They also help each-other very much. Most of the official games were programmed on a strict schedule, with costs increasing day by day, and covered by industrial secret. I suppose that most of the homebrews would lead instantly to bankruptcy if carried on in an actual business environment.

So yes, we're all spoiled like little babies, and cannot be content of our pixelated classic heroes anymore .

Well, not really for those among us that know how to put things in perspective. I can be impressed by the accuracy of a todays standard car racing game, but I still find games like Atari 2600's Indy 500 fast, fun and amusing. In most cases the fun of a game resides in the game scheme itself, not in screen definition. Games that only rely on cool graphics usually grow thin very fast. Pac-Mania had 3D graphics but was no way more fun than Pac-Man itself, at least IMHO.

The fun in retrogaming is indeed to find out what GREAT games have been made with very limited, few sparse components.

[orion70]

Of course, gameplay is another fundamental aspect of retrogaming - my personal favorite are text adventures!

[Vic 2000]

I honestly don't think Atari 2600's version of Pac Man was bad. Ok, it's not great if you compare it to the arcade, but if it didn't have the Pac Man license to be for such a comparison, it wouldn't be such a bad game on its own. Just play it without thinking of it as a port.

The big problem about the orginal Pac Man was the terrible flickering choppy moving ghosts. Atari didn't had the time to make a proper version and was forced to release Pac Man as fast as possible to feed all hungry gamers. Their next Pac Man (Ms Pac Man) was much better done.

Yet Pac Man became the number one selling game for 2600, so big that it's even accused for being a big reason for the video game crash in 1983. Pac Man for Atari 2600 sold over 7 million copies and Atari manufactured 12 million copies of the game.

When looking at this home brew game, the orginal Pac Man could have been so much better.

But as you say, i'm sure of that many kids back then had plenty fun playing the orginal version too.

[highinfidelity]

Yet Pac Man became the number one selling game for 2600, so big that it's even accused for being a big reason for the video game crash in 1983. Pac Man for Atari 2600 sold over 7 million copies and Atari manufactured 12 million copies of the game.

Correct, many people say that and I think it's ridicolous. I never read a decent argumentation of how such a best-seller could be held responsible for a crash. One might perhaps conjecture that about ET, which was a quite infamous game even back then (but again: absolutely NOT as much as many people today pretend it to have been), but Pac-Man definitely no. Kids were crazy for it, and by the way most of them never actually played the real Pac-Man at an arcade so they had no comparison. We played the hell out of 2600's Pac-Man in the early eighties, and that's the only fact.

More in general, I suspect that also all the "Video Game Crash" fuss was really nothing special but happened to be emphasized because it pertained to a fresh new business with unknown dynamics; but things like that happen everyday and we're so accustomed to them we don't even see them anymore. Some years ago all dudes sent out those cool messages that ended with "sent with my Blackberry", later you were considered a looser if you did't have an i# in your pocket (put whatever figure you like to replace the # wildcard), today you'll never date a chick should you haven't a Samsung Android with Whatsapp installed. What happened to Blackberries and their OSs? Nobody cares and I can hardly figure big books being written about it 40 years from now, but that was also a big planetary crash.

[Vic 2000]

The programmer of Atari 2600 Pac Man was Tod Frye

Why Pac Man contained lots of technical flaws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tod_Frye

Frye landed the 2600 Pac-Man project in early 1981. Atari had licensed the arcade games Defender and Pac-Man and while Frye preferred Defender, when fellow programmer Bob Poloro got that assignment, Frye got Pac-Man by default. Frye's landing the high-profile title did not pass without critical comment. One Atari employee wrote "Why Frye?" on the Pac-Man arcade machine contained in Atari's in-office arcade room. In response, Frye drew a horizontal line over the "Why", which means "Why not Frye" in logic notation.

Frye's Pac-Man port was started in May 1981, and was the most anticipated release for 1982, so marketing pressed Frye to produce the game on a very strict timetable (in the early 1980s lead times on the cartridge ROMs was several months, so the code needed to be completed in September 1981 to get the product into stores during the first quarter of 1982). Atari corporate management demanded Frye complete the game in the standard 4K ROM, despite his repeated requests that 8K of ROM be allocated.

Frye made several decisions which later proved controversial. First, he decided to support two-player gameplay, which meant memory which could otherwise be used for gameplay was instead utilized to store the game states, scores, and arrangement of pellets for two players instead of one. Second, he chose to abandon plans for a flicker-management system which would have minimized the flashing of objects. Finally, he decided to change the color scheme of the game from black and bright blue to pale blue and dark yellow. As a result, the title drew criticism, and some players complained that although the design passively resembled its arcade counterpart, it lacked in both quality control and craftsmanship.

Criticisms aside Pac-Man proved to be a stunning financial coup for Atari, and Frye reportedly received $0.10 in royalties per Pac-Man cartridge. Atari would manufacture 12 million cartridges, making Frye a millionaire in the process.

Another fun fact

After seeing the game, Coin Division marketing manager Frank Ballouz informed Ray Kassar, Atari's president and CEO, that he felt enthusiasts would not want to play it. His opinion, however, was dismissed. The company ran newspaper ads and promoted the product in catalogs, describing it as differing "slightly from the original". To help sales, Atari promoted and protected its exclusive licensing of Pac-Man. It took legal action against companies that released clones similar to Pac-Man. Atari sued Philips for its 1981 Magnavox Odyssey² game Munchkin and obtained a preliminary injunction against the company to prevent the sale of Munchkin cartridges, but failed to stop other games, such as On-Line Systems' Jawbreaker and Gobber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_%28Atari_2600%29

[orion70]

...but failed to stop other games, such as On-Line Systems' Jawbreaker and Gobber.

...and Commodore's Jelly Monsters of course

[Vic 2000]

Not really, Commodore recieved a lawsuit from Atari too. Jelly Monsters was replaced by Atarisofts Pac Man.

Jelly Monsters for the Commodore VIC-20 is a faithful port of Namco's Pac-Man by HAL Laboratory who had the home computer rights to Namco's games in Japan at the time, but when the games were release in North America, the names were changed to avoid legal issues with Atari, Inc. who had the home computer rights in North America to Jelly Monsters for the VIC-20 which was published by Commodore International, Atari ended up suing HAL and Commodore anyway and won the lawsuit, Atari pulled off HAL's VIC-20 port and released their own version, after the lawsuit HAL sold the Japanese home computer rights to Dempa who ended up porting the game to many home computers in Japan, this excluded the MSX version of the game of which Namco ported themselves under their Namcot branding.

http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Jelly_Monsters

[pixel]

On what kind of hardware did they actually develop the first VCS games?

[English Invader]

On what kind of hardware did they actually develop the first VCS games?

I imagine it would have been an emulator for the 2600's custom 6502 and graphics on an Altair/Imsai type machine and then some sort of device to copy the file onto a ROM cartridge.

[pixel]

My guess was a PDP-10 and a VCS with RAM cartridge. Googled "atari vcs 2600 pdp-11" and found this:
http://www.computerhistory.org/revoluti ... mes/16/185 ("Atari 2600 prototype")

They seem to have done it on a PDP-11 and downloaded their code to a development version of the VCS.

[Vic 2000]

What are the real facts behind Atari 2600 Pac-Man’s development?
http://ataribook.com/book/what-are-the- ... velopment/