The Ports that Destroyed a Company

In 1980 there were few games larger than Pac-Man. The little yellow puck that could stormed into arcades worldwide and took the gaming marketplace by storm. After Pac-Man, every other company wanted their own maze-chase game, and even Namco struggled to find a suitable successor to their massive success. It took a company making conversion kits, General Computer Corp., working with American distributor Midway to find the right formula to make the next great maze-chase title, and that was Ms. Pac-Man.

Everyone wanted more Pac-Man. In arcades, at home, anywhere they could get it. The home console companies wanted a taste of those sweet, sweet Pac-dollars, and Atari was the first to strike while the iron was hot. Released in 1982, the Atari 2600 port was anticipated by audiences across the country and, well, it was an unmitigated disaster. Developed by Tod Frye, the game was made over the course of six months, with much pressure by the higher-ups at Atari to get the game out the door as fast as possible. They had the license, and they knew fans wanted the game. It didn’t matter what state the port was in, they just had to get it on shelves.

In fairness to Frye, he was fighting an uphill battle making this game. Corporate pressure was one thing, of course, but Frye wasn’t given any of the technical specs for the game from Namco or Midway, so he had to develop the title simply by playing the game and getting a feel for how it worked. He was also battling the Atari hardware, which wasn’t anywhere near as good as the actual arcade hardware. Frye had to work to get anything even halfway playable that, in any form, resembled Pac-Man as audiences expected it. He worked 80 hour weeks for those six months, and at least got something that could be considered playable.

The fact is, though, that it just wasn’t very good. There are any number of issues with this version of Pac-Man, and all of them come up the instant you load the game. For starters, the game barely resembles Pac-Man. The Atari 2600 port features graphics very different from the arcade title, with colored-in mazes and a sickly blue background replacing the minimalist walls on black that make the original arcade title symbolic. The pellets of the game were dashes instead of dots as well, a curious change that feels so strange when you look at it. The Atari could handle pixels, so even if the dots had to be spaced out, why use dashes instead? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The maze arrangement was different as well, featuring a longer horizontal layout and warp points at the top and bottom of the maze instead of on the sides. You can attribute this to the orientation of TVs at the time, while the arcade machine had a rotated monitor for play, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game simply feels different even just looking at it. Everything about the arrangement of the stages felt wrong, top to bottom (or left to right, if you will), leading to a game that requires you to squint and tilt your head when looking at it to actually see anything that resembles Pac-Man.

But then the gameplay was even worse. Yes, at its core you’re mostly doing the same actions, feeding Pac-Man along to collect the pellets (the dashes) while ghosts chase you around the screen. Except here there are only two ghosts at a time instead of four. This was likely as much to do with the limitations of the hardware at the time as it was because of the short span that Frye had to work with to get the game running. The ghosts also have terrible AI, barely showing any of the intelligence that made them difficult foes to deal with in arcades. Of course, you can also forget learning patterns and working for perfect runs as the game doesn’t care about that at all. This is a simplistic, pared down take that barely excited anyone.

Initially the Atari port of Pac-Man was a success, with high anticipation for the game translating into sales of over 7 Mil copies during its first season’s run. However, after that first wave, sales quickly dropped off. Atari did eventually sell 8 Mil total copies, but there were a lot of extra carts left on shelves, and untold unsold product that glutted the marketplace. It’s also thought that the bad critical reception of the game, and audiences feeling duped by the bait-and-switch of what they expected versus why they actually got, eroded consumer confidence in video games and led, by the next year, to the great video game collapse of 1983.

Of course, before that happened Atari quickly got another Pac-Man game out to consumers in the form of a home port of Ms. Pac-Man. This one was a slight improvement over the first port of the series. The game more closely resembles the arcade edition, even if that sickly blue background was still around (this was apparently due to a mandate from within Atari that only space games could have a black background). The mazes are closer in approximation to the arcade version, and the game even featured all four ghosts this time around. Some compromises had to be made, and the gameplay still feels slightly off, but in comparison to the Pac-Man port, the differences were night and day. This felt like a proper game, not just some half-baked creation made to grift money from consumers.

Still, the damage had been done. Atari had proven that they were more concerned with cranking out poor quality products rather than spending the time and effort to make truly great games. Even if the port of Ms. Pac-Man was better, it only got the series closer to where it should have been the first time around. It still didn’t look quite right, didn’t sound that great, and was limited by the hardware in ways that make the play experience less than ideal. Had this been the state of the first game of the series then fans might have been willing to excuse some wonkiness. But as the second port for the series, it might just have been too little, too late.

Only one more port of the series made it to Atari consoles, and that was an adaptation of Jr. Pac-Man (which we’ll cover in more detail when we get to that title). It was developed in 1984 but not released until 1986 when the game market recovered, in large part due to the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo rebuilt the market, and that helped to give Atari a bit of a resurgence as well, letting them release some developed, but not yet published, games in the later years of the console’s (undead) life. Sadly, other ports of Pac-Man titles that had been developed, like Super Pac-Man, didn’t get the same fate and remained finished but unpublished years later.

Certainly Pac-Man can’t take all the blame for killing Atari. Poor corporate decisions, rushed production schedules, and too much money spent on bad ideas (like E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial) didn’t help matters either, and all of this led to consumers thinking the worst of the video game market as a whole. What was a thriving, billion dollar business crashed out hard and took a ton of companies and consoles with it. Most retailers were burned hard by the crash, and many were reticent to get back into the business when Nintendo came around. Still, Pac-Man’s awful port was a contributing factor, and Atari deserves much of the blame for the fiasco. A few different changes, a little more time in the hopper, and the game might just have been what audiences wanted. And then who knows where the business could have gone…