PixlBit

(Originally posted on my 1UP blog)

Pac-Man, rivalled only by Mario as the world's most famous video game character, made his debut in 1980. The initial response to Pac-Man in Japan was underwhelming, so nobody had high hopes for Pac-Man's long-term success. Once he hit America, however, Pac-Man became an overnight sensation. The game would go on to shatter every sales record set by Space Invaders and Asteroids to become the best-selling arcade game of all time, producing a huge boon not only for Namco, but for its American licensees - Bally/Midway in the arcades, and Atari at home. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was the best selling video game of all time at the time, selling over 7 millon copies. Too bad Atari produced 12 million copies to sell to a 2600 install base of 10 million, but that's all in the past. To this day, Pac-Man continues to be hugely popular and almost universally well-known, even by people who don't play video games.

Naturally, once Pac-Man hit it big, its makers wanted to keep that gravy train rolling at high speed. But the two main parties involved - Namco in Japan and Midway in the United States - built their own different railroads for the Pac-Man gravy train, railroads which eventually collided and led to an angry Namco terminating Midway's rights to the Pac-Man IP.

Of many Pac-Man sequels produced in the time period leading up the the Video Game Crash of 1983, only one was actually made by Pac-Man creator Tohru Iwatani at Namco in Japan - Super Pac-Man, a game which was not a success but is still proudly included in Pac-Man canon by Namco and has made subsequent appearances in Namco Museum collections. The rest were produced in the United States, without Namco's consent or involvement, and in one case by a party completely outside the Namco/Midway deal.

That game, of course, was Ms. Pac-Man, a game which is considered superior to Pac-Man in every way and is one of the few arcade games you're still likely to find. Produced by a group of hackers who reverse-engineered a Pac-Man machine, Ms. Pac-Man was bought by Midway, and published without Namco's involvement. Eventually, Midway sold the Ms. Pac-Man game back to Namco, and Namco continues to sell Ms. Pac-Man on every platform under the sun. However Namco only grudgingly acknowledges Ms. Pac-Man as part of the official Pac-Man canon, less even than Super Pac-Man.

Bally/Midway's approach was different from that of Namco and Super Pac-Man. Instead, they decided to focus on the Pac-Man family, an idea reinforced by the Pac-Man cartoon produced by American animation studio Hanna-Barbera, and they produced several sequels to Pac-Man based first on Ms. Pac-Man, then on the cartoon. Eventually, with the market glutted with Pac-Man, Namco pulled the plug. These games are never acknowledged as canon Pac-Man, and Namco seems to have completely disowned them. They are only playable on emulators, with one exception.

So, here are the forgotten (and unofficial) Pac-Man classics!

Baby Pac-Man (1982)

In the third intermission scene of Ms. Pac-Man, the Pac couple receive a new baby Pac-Man from the stork. This goes on until you lose all your lives or reach the kill screen, whichever comes first. By that time, the Pac family would up there with the Octomom or John and Kate Gosselin! So Bally/Midway decided to take the Pac-Man concept in a new direction: Baby Pac-Man!

Baby Pac-Man never had any official home release: for an obvious reason: It's a hybrid of an arcade video game and a pinball machine. The video game throws you into a maze with four ghosts and dots... and nothing else. There are no energizers. What gives? Baby Pac-Man has to earn them by playing pinball! When you guide Baby Pac-Man (he doesn't have any distinguishing marks, no baby bonnet or pacifier or anything like that) into one of the chutes at the bottom of the screen, the game switches from the screen to the pinball table. By hitting targets with the pinball, you'll put energizers in the maze, upgrade the fruits from cherry to strawberry to orange and so on, increase Baby Pac-Man's speed going through tunnels, and pad your overall score. Once you lose your ball, the game returns to the video maze and the chutes close (they'll reopen each time you're caught by the ghosts).

 

Baby Pac-Man was an interesting novelty, as it was one of only three known pinball/video game hybrids. There were only 10,000 Baby Pac-Man machines made, making it one of the rarest games in existence. I saw it a couple of times when on vacation with my family when I was a little kid, but some of my friends didn't even believe Baby Pac-Man existed! It does. Unfortunately, Baby Pac-Man had one serious flaw. Tohru Iwatani programmed the ghosts with their own distinctive movement patterns, This was consciously done to make Pac-Man tough but still give the player a fair chance. In Baby Pac-Man, these patterns are gone, and it's like being chased by four Blinkies or Pinkies, making the maze portion of the game incredibly frustrating.

If you're interested in trying this ultra-rare game, watch the above video in YouTube. The person who posted it provided a link to a self-extracting package which will install the game in Windows and allow you to play it - pinball and all - through Pin-MAME. Oh, and you can also use Pin-MAME to make your own pinball tables. The visuals are a bit like Zen's pinball games on PSN and Xbox Live, although not quite as nice-looking.

Jr. Pac-Man

For their next attempt at Pac-money, Bally/Midway ditched the pinball hybrid and made their next Pac-Man game a straight-up video game. In this case, they used the Ms. Pac-Man engine to create their next game, Jr. Pac-Man.

Jr. Pac-Man was directly inspired by the style of the H-B Pac-Man cartoon. I don't know if Jr. Pac-Man is meant to be a preschool-age Baby Pac-Man or Baby Pac's older brother. In-game, he wears a propeller beanie that spins as he moves. He's once again thrown into a maze with Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde  Tim, full of dots to eat and energizers available. The big twist in Jr. Pac-Man is that the mazes are now much larger. They're larger than the screen, in fact, and so the screen scrolls from side to side as Jr. Pac-Man moves through it, and the ghosts and the treats move off screen. The ghosts have their old movement patterns restored, so the game isn't as cheap and frustrating as the maze portions of Baby Pac-Man. Unfortunately, to accomodate the scrolling mazes, the warp tunnels - an integral part of a good Pac-Man game - were sacrificed, meaning Jr. has less respite from the relentless pursuit of the ghosts, and the size of the mazes makes them exhausting.

 

Like Ms. Pac-Man, the game features moving treats - in this case, preschool toys like tricycles, drums, balloons, and (a-hem!) cats. One difference here is that when the treats move over dots, it changes them into dots which are more valuable (50 points apiece instead of 10 points), but slow Jr. down much more than regular dots. If the treat touches a power pellet, it self-destructs, taking the power pellet with it, making the treats a potential liability.

Also like Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man features intermission scenes. These scenes depict an apparently budding romance between Jr. and Yum-Yum, the ribbon-wearing daughter of Blinky the red ghost. Of course, since their parents are mortal enemies, the romance is a Romeo and Juliet situation. In the first intermission, when Jr. and Yum-Yum become interested in each other, Blinky comes out to chase Jr. away, and Ms. Pac-Man scares both of them off by eating a power pellet before sending Jr. back into the house, ostensibly to go to his room!

Unlike Baby Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man did have some scant chance for home release. A 2600 version was released, but since the original game was made during the 1983 video game crash, the game didn't make a big splash at home in 1987, when Nintendo and Mario reigned supreme. There was also a 5200 version in the works, but due to Atari's sale to the Tramiels which resulted in the guttiing of the console division, it was never officially released. However, the ROM was leaked and spread through the hacking community for Atari's 800/XL/XE computer line. Since Atari's 8-bit computers shared the same basic architecture as the 5200, it was easy for hackers to convert 5200 games for use on the XL/XE computers, so a lot of 5200 games that got cancelled found new life on the Atari 8-bit line, including Jr. Pac-Man.

And the rest...

Bally/Midway produced two other Pac-Man games without Namco's involvement before Namco terminated the licensing agreement. Pac-Man Plus was simply a re-skinned version of the original Pac-Man with different ghost animations and the treats changed into objects like cans of Coca-Cola. Namco was probably chagrined when the US-made Pac-Man Plus ended up being a bigger financial success than Super Pac-Man, a game produced in-house by Namco in Japan.  The other game was Professor Pac-Man, which Midway hoped would carry Pac-Man's success over into an expected boom in trivia games that ultimately never materialized.

So there you have it. Namco will never, ever acknowledge these Pac-Man games, and you'll never see them in any Namco Museum compilations. But these games are worth looking into, for the curiosity factor if nothing else!