Let’s Tease Your Brain While You Drink

And now, as we go through the whole of the Pac-Man series, we have ventured way off the reservation. Bally Midway, who had the rights to produce Pac-Man games in North American, and due to their own chicanery used that “license” to make all new games in the series that Namco didn’t originally approve of, decided they had a gold mine on their hands and wanted to crank out as many Pac-Man games as they could before the property no longer was hot. This let them make many varied games in the series, venturing out in ways Namco likely didn’t appreciate or wanted.

Remember, Namco was off making their own series of titles that changed up the gameplay and pushed to do new things with the yellow chomper while still keeping his adventures within the confines of mazes. Super Pac-Man and follow-up Pac & Pal shows the direction Namco was interested in exploring. Bally Midway, though, had their own ideas and they didn’t much care to follow the same route as Namco. In fact, as proven by their ventures into making Pac-Man into pinball, Bally Midway wasn’t even interested in making the same kinds of games as Namco. If it worked as an arcade game concept, Bally Midway wanted to make their own version with the Pac-Man license slapped on.

That’s how we get to Professor Pac-Man, a game that is technically part of the Pac-Man series by grace of the fact that it has the license. That is, however, the only real connection as in all other respects this is about as far as you can get from a real Pac-Man game. It would be like making a generic platformer with a hero going left-to-right across the world, and then slapping the Pac-Man license on that and… What? That came soon after this title? Wow, we really have ventured far out into the wasteland…

Professor Pac-Man isn’t a maze-chase game. In fact, outside of a single puzzle contained within the game (which the players don’t actually play, mind you), there’s no maze-chasing of any kind in this game. Instead, Professor Pac-Man is a trivia quiz game, like the kind you’ll sometimes see decorating bar-tops across the world. The game is quite simple: The yellow professor will give players multiple-choice questions and, within a short amount of time, the players have to answer those questions. Answer them right and you get a bunch of points. Answer enough wrong, though, and it’s game over.

The game has 500 questions (with the ability to add more, although expansion packs for the game were never made). These vary from watching Pac travel through a maze and figuring out how many right turns he took to get to the center, to looking at buildings and figuring out how many have a certain type of window, or which one had the fewest. You’ll look at objects and try to figure out which one is the mirror image, or see a sequence of monkeys and have to see how many of a certain type there were. The questions get more elaborate, requiring you to notice more and more about the objects in front of you, all before you answer with A, B, or C on the controls in front of you.

I will admit that I have trouble judging this game properly. On the one hand, the trivia concept is interesting. Going in I assumed the game was just going to ask general knowledge questions, like, “who was the leader of the Soviet Union in 1967?” or “how many miles are in a kilometer?” Stuff like that. Instead, the questions are all about weird objects or sequences you have to study and then answer afterwards. That means that technically anyone can answer these questions without any previous knowledge, which is kind of nice.

With that said, I do think the questions are incredibly hard to answer. Any time you’re presented with a problem, the game will flash the sequence or objects at you and just say, “study.” After, you’re then asked a question about what you just saw, frequently without knowing what you were supposed to study or what the question even would have been. When I’m looking at buildings am I supposed to study the windows, the signage, the colors? And it’s like this with each of these “study” questions. Considering the thing you were supposed to study is removed from the screen when the answer is posted, it’s hard to remember anything.

I get it, this is part of the game play loop. If Bally Midway had made the questions too easy then the players would sit at the machines for hours. So they start off kind of hard and then get incredibly hard very quickly, all so that you get your three minutes of game play and then get kicked off. Still, it’s a very frustrating experience when you have to look at objects without knowing what you’re even looking for to begin with. This is a game that required a lot of practice, and plenty of quarters, to even get marginally decent at the experience.

And all for what, really? A game of looking at objects and trying to see what’s different. It’s a skill game, I guess, but not the kind of skill you expect from Pac-Man. Certainly it lacks the kind of adrenaline fix that the classic maze-chase games would get. While there probably was some thrill getting deep into the game and finding that zen-like state of matching monkeys and identifying windows, but that still doesn’t seem anywhere near as fun as guiding the yellow pellet muncher around a maze. It’s far less interactive, leaving you with less control over the experience in general.

Meanwhile, if we really think about this, this is a terrible game for the audience it was intended to entertain. If you’re at a bar, drinking, playing a trivia game, this one is going to quickly get away from you. Anyone inebriated is going to struggle to answer the questions this game raised, in large part because it requires very fast, meticulous thinking, and that’s not the kind of behavior bar patrons tend to exhibit. They might have had fun on it for a little while, but my guess is that fun was short-lived and fleeting.

All of that is compounded on the fact that this is a game that says it’s Pac-Man when it’s really not. The license is used superficially at best, with Pac dressed up as a professor in the game, ghosts and fruit occasionally appearing as part of the questions, and that’s it. Anyone hoping for the next great Pac-Man experience would come away from this title sorely disappointed. This game says it’s Pac-Man, but it lies. It lies hard.

It’s no wonder, then, that the game failed to catch on with arcade visitors. Bally Midway had plans to release three different versions of the game – family friendly, general audiences, and a version exclusively for bars – along with question expansion packs to keep the game varied for players. None of that happened, of course, and after a short run in arcades, many Professor Pac-Man machines were returned and converted into Pac-Land cabinets instead. There was simply no love for Professor Pac-Man but, really, if Bally Midway had put more thought into the “should we” instead of the “could we” aspect of the situation, they should have been able to see this coming.

Professor Pac-Man isn’t a bad trivia game, at least not for a certain segment of the populace that have brains that can sync up with what the game demands. It is, however, a terrible Pac-Man title, and that alone ensured its demise.