A Complete Pac-Attack On All Fronts

While Namco was focused on the video game side of Pac-Man in arcades, Bally Midway was far more likely to play the field. They had interests in many different kinds of machines, not just stand up arcade cabinets or other form factors but even pinball machines, and they weren’t afraid to apply the licenses they had to whatever machines they could create. That explains why, in the midst of audiences feeling the Pac-Man Fever, the company cranked out not one but two completely different Pac-Man pinball machines.

To be clear, these are two very different experiences. One machine, Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man, was a tried and true pinball table, while the other, Baby Pac-Man, was an interesting hybrid experience. They both have their charms, but each are equally obscure at this point because neither would translate well to home video game markets:

Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man

The first of Bally Midway’s Pac-Man pinball experiments was Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man, a full-sized pinball machine that featured only slight Pac-Man theming. Sure, when you first put a quarter into the machine it’ll play the Pac-Man theme, and naturally there are decals and artwork on the setup that evokes the Pac-Man art of the era (even if, for some reason, our heroine is now Mrs. instead of Ms.), but once you get into the game there’s a lot that feels less like Pac-Man and more like just another pinball title.

Once you launch the ball onto the table you are immediately thrown into a very stripped down version of Pac-Man. There’s a central light panel on the board with a yellow dot flashing representing Pac and a red dot flashing representing a ghost. Using the flippers to move a four directional arrow, the goal is to light all the lights of the central square. You get limited time to do it, and touching the ghost will, of course, end this bonus round. It’s an interesting little idea that does add something akin to Pac-Man’s maze-chase elements into the table, but it’s also a slight experience, really.

When not moving the light around the grind, the rest of the game is standard pinball. You have the flippers at the bottom, plus one up on the high right side, circular bumpers up top and triangular ones at the bottom, and a single ramp on the left that takes the ball up and around and back to the maze element to continue playing. Naturally, your turn ends when the ball falls down into the bottom, and your game is completely over when you lose all your balls. Again, standard Pac-Man experience.

Naturally it’s hard to review a game like this unless you’re in front of it, but this table does seem like a pretty average experience for pinball. While the central square maze is a nice touch, adding in the requisite Pac-Man theming the table needed, it doesn’t appear to be all that fun to control or play. And because the maze lights take up so much space in the middle, a lot of the board feels weirdly empty. I’m sure the game has its fans, of course, but this feels like a slight Pac-Man experience even for its original release year of 1982. And it’s even worse when you consider what came next that would shove this table into the dirt…

Baby Pac-Man

Bally Midway’s follow up to their first Pac-Man pinball experiment was something that would add much more to the experience and really make the game feel like Pac-Man but also pinball. Baby Pac-Man (not to be confused with the later game, Jr. Pac-Man, which was also released by Bally Midway) is a strange, hybrid game that combines the best elements of both Pac-Man and pinball into a game that absolutely makes both sides of the equation feel necessary. If just the idea of combining these two elements together sounds intriguing, this might just be the game for you.

The game is split into, effectively, two halves. Play starts up on the top area, with a screen built into the upper area of the stand-up machine. There we have a basic Pac-Man game, with our hero (presumably the titular baby) forced to go around the maze, eating pellets while they’re chased by four ghosts. The trick of it is that there aren’t any power pellets immediately loaded on the board, just empty spaces where they should be. There’s a horizontal chute you can use to warp between sides of the screen, but there are also vertical chutes at the bottom, and that’s where the second half of the gameplay comes in.

Spend too long on the upper screen without collecting pellets, or go down the vertical chute, and you’ll end up in the miniature pinball half of the game. Here the goal is to score points and rack up combos. Scoring points and combos will give the player more points, of course, but it also will place power pellets on the upper screen and also increase the tunnel speed as well. To play the game well, and come away with your best chance of clearing mazes and beating stages, you have to play both sides of the game and score all you can. And, at any time, you can move back up to the maze munching side just by shooting the ball up to the chute, and the baby will come back up, ready to eat some more.

What’s nice is that unlike in other pinball games, dropping down the chute at the bottom of the pinball side of the table doesn’t count as a loss of a life. No, if you fall down on the pinball side the baby goes back to the center of the maze to continue his pellet munching life. The only way to actually die is to touch a ghost on the maze side. Thus, you only end your game when you lose all your lives in the maze. The pinball side is there just for points and to increase your durability in the maze.

Honestly, I really like this game concept. It’s a hybrid experience that actually works, letting you play two completely different games in a way that seamlessly merges them together. It’s the kind of machine where, if I saw it in an arcade (if I even saw an arcade out there and, really, who even knows where an arcade is anymore?) I’d absolutely have to drop a few quarters in just to enjoy the experience. It’s so weird, but seems so fun, that it’s a game I want to enjoy. Pinball plus Pac-Man shouldn’t work, but this game makes it seem like it does.

Of course, there’s a reason why this one, like Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man fell into obscurity: translating this to a home video experience would be very hard to pull off. Sure, a game company could have made two sides of the experience, with the maze chase screen leading to a video pinball screen, but it just wouldn’t have the same feel. It would lack the tactile quality, of course, and, if we’re being honest, video pinball has never been as good, or as interesting, as the real thing. This is the kind of game that demands to be played live, on an actual machine (if you can even find one that’s still working, of course).

Plus, this was a Bally Midway experiment, and not even one of their more successful ones that demanded translation to the home market. It’s so weird and goofy it’s hard to think many arcades would have been willing to pay for such an expensive machine (not only in upfront costs but also for maintenance of the pinball side) even during the height of Pac-Man Fever. It might have been fun, but there was still a cost of entry many arcade owners likely wouldn’t have wanted to pay. Why buy this expensive machine when they could get another Pac-Man with a swapped out board?

With all that being said, there is a way to play the game at home, via a homebrew of the game done for the Atari 7800. Again, it’s not like the real thing since it’s video pinball, but any version is better than letting this weird experiment fall into complete obscurity. If you have the time, I absolutely recommend checking it out.