Atari has a new bright yellow Pac-Man Edition of their 2600+ mini-console, along with a new 7800 2-in-1 version of the game, as well as a family of joysticks in the colour of Pac-Man and the ghosts that chased him around the playfield, all to seemingly celebrate the wildly popular arcade game classic, and Atari’s adaptation of it for the home, made by Tod Frye.
I find it pretty hilarious that Atari is leaning into their adaptation of Pac-Man, especially since they allude to the issue of why they probably shouldn’t in the next part of the ad:
Yes, that’s right, Atari, “Infamous”. Infamous because the 2600 version of Pac-Man is one of the worst video games ever made, and as I point out in my article here at The Dot Eaters about The Great Video Game Crash, the disappointment felt by fans of the arcade original, or really, of video games in general, was palpable… so much so that it helped crater the entire industry. The game looked barely like the arcade game, played like it even less, and the less said about the flat sound effects, the better. Not only were customers greatly disappointed, but so were game retailers who had to deal with massive returns of the game after people tried playing it. Stock balancing policies meant that these returned cartridges were then sent back to Atari for a refund, further dragging down company revenue.
It’s further goofy to me that Atari accentuates the color aspect of these new releases, as their 2600 Pac-Man was nearly monochrome in nature…. a problem particularly when a player would eat a “vitamin” to turn the tables on the ghosts, and they remained nearly the same, drab, flickering shade they are for the rest of the game. It’s telling that Atari has put the graphics of the arcade game on their Pac-Man edition of the 2600+, because if they put the home game characters on there, the vast gulf between the original and Atari’s version would be on full display.
Here’s a video I made a long time ago, showing Atari’s fetid excuse for a Pac-Man adaptation in “action”. Judge for yourself, if you have the intestinal fortitude. While, with a video, you don’t get to experience how awful the game was to actually play, what with the sluggish “control” you have over Pac-Man…. although you can see me struggle to move the character through the passageways. The “game feel” of manic maze games was a critical part of the player experience; control in Atari’s Pac-Man leaves one feeling as deflated as Pac after he is caught by a ghost.
