Please, Stop, I Want to Get Off

Now here is one of the oddest entries in the Pac-ManNamco's yellow pellet gobbler debuted in 1980 and took the world by storm, launching a long series of games. franchise. While Namco hadn’t been the sole contributor to Pac-Man arcade games, largely because Bally-Midway decided their license to make the original Pac-Man cabinets also let them publish their own spin-offs as well, Namco was in full control of the license after that original arcade run wrapped up. They controlled the franchise, they had approval for anything that went out after that, and alongside the absolutely excellent Pac-Man Arrangement in 1996 the company decided they needed to take things even further. They needed Pac… in true 3D.

But remember, this was 1996. 3D games were still finding themselves. There were home consoles cranking out 3D works, like the Nintendo 64, but in arcades every company was trying to find their own footing. Namco, deciding they needed a leg up on the competition, didn’t just want a bog standard version of Pac-Man with spruced up graphics. They wanted something that would stand out from the crowd. They wanted Pac-Man that was in your face. Literally. They wanted a VR Pac-Man game.

Teaming up with Virtuality, who made a range of VR arcade setups, Namco gave the company the right to make Pac-Man VR. The setup was “simple”, in a way. Players were put into a padded stand (so they couldn’t really move away from the base station) and had VR goggles on their face, with a controller in their hand. And then they were dumped into a recreation of the original Pac-Man, but with everything rendered in full 3D.

It was the same basic setup in the game. You were Pac, dumped into the middle of a maze, and you had to move around, collecting pellets, grabbing power pellets, and either avoiding (or eating) ghosts as you could. But instead of viewing it from a top-down perspective, as in classic Pac-Man, you were viewing the maze as Pac would, from a first-person perspective that put you right into the action. In theory this maybe made sense as everyone knew how to play Pac-Man so you could get into the game and just go. In practice, though, it was a real mess.

The first issue was the helmet and how it tied into the game. Like with most VR games, moving your head around (with the goggles strapped on) moves your perspective in the game. You could look around, focus, and figure out where you wanted to go. Of course, since you were strapped into the base station, moving your head didn’t just shift your perspective; it would also continue to rotate your character, as it could, around the axis you were standing on. Again, great in theory, but it had a nasty consequence: motion sickness.

As you’re moving and whipping around, the game is trying to adjust and keep up with you. That’s already bad enough with a basic setup, but then because your rotation is head dependent, it can be hard to keep your tracking stable with the game. It could move more than you expected, and then you’d have to whip back, and that would cause feedback into your brain that would lead to queasy feelings.

And that was if the graphics and frame rate could keep up. They couldn’t always, and so not only would your movements lurch around, the graphics could stagger and lurch as well. This game is hard to track down even in the best of circumstances, so recreations via emulation are required for this, but playing the experience as best as we can feels so awful. Strapping in and playing with the game is an easy way to make you lose whatever lunch you might have had beforehand (so, word to the wise, don’t eat before attempting).

Plus, honestly, the whole experience playing the game isn’t great. This isn’t as smooth a gameplay loop as in standard Pac-Man, even though it was designed to mirror the play style of that classic arcade title. You move at an awkward speed through the maze, and you’re not just moving along standard cardinal lines. You can move in any direction you’re facing, with 360 degree rotation along the flat plane. That means you can cut diagonals and move along staggered paths. As a consequence, you can also easily get caught on walls and be unable to quickly move off them before a ghost strikes.

Keeping up with the ghosts is also a lot harder when you can only see the parts of the maze in front of you and aren’t easily able to track where every ghost is. Similarly, if you leave a pellet behind and move into a different section of the maze, you’ll have a hard time figuring out what you missed since you can’t see the whole maze at a glance. The strategy of Pac-Man requires you to be able to see the whole maze and anticipate dangers before they get to you, but Pac-Man VR functionally precludes that simply by the way it’s built.

And all for what? A compromised version of Pac-Man that cost too much and wasn’t all that fun to play? Bear in mind that while the VR setup was new and exciting, it was also expensive to play on. The Virtuality setup cost five dollars for five minutes, which was a steep price to pay for any game, let alone a terrible one like that. You were functionally paying for the novelty, trying to live your best The Lawnmower Man life. Whether the games were good or not was secondary to saying you tried it. In that regard I suppose a Pac-Man was as good a test title as any, but it didn’t make for a good experience.

This title is just mind-boggling, honestly. Like, I kind of get what the two companies were going for. At the time few arcade franchises were as well known as Pac-Man, and translating that title over into a new form factor probably was easier than trying to make, say, a true VR version of Virtual Fighter or the like. But this game simply didn’t come together in a fun form. It’s janky, hard to play, and simply not that fun. Maybe you could get Pac-Man into any form factor, but that doesn’t mean that you should.