Considerably one of the best arcade game of all time and one of the worst atari 2600 games of all time, Pac-Man has left a huge impression on the video game world and will probably have the largest chapter in the big book of video game history.
Before:
In 1955, the company of Nakamura Manufacturing was founded in Tokyo, Japan by Mayasa Nakamura. In 1958, the company had a slight name change to Nakamura Facturing Co. which would later be shortened to Namco. In 1970, the company produced a coin-op mechanical simulator called Racer. Atari Japan, a Tokyo based division of Atari, was struggling financially in 1974. Nakamura struck a deal with Nolan Bushnell allowing Namco to buy out the company for 500,000 dollars. Namco ended up inheriting all the debts Atari Japan had, but were able to distribute Atari games for ten years. Because of this deal, Namco opened up a series of arcades with Atari games. In 1978 Namco produced its first original video game, Gee Bee.
"It looks like pinball on crack."
In 1979, Namco revolutionized the video game industry by producing the first video game with RBG color graphics and that game was Galaxian.
"Isn't Galaga, I mean, Galaxian a great game?"
Also in 1979, young Namco employee, Toru Iwatani, was to develop a game over the course of the year. While at a American pizza restaurant, Iwatani was inspired by a missing pizza slice and the Japanese slang phrase paku-paku taberu (paku-paku describes the sound of a mouth opening and closing in succession) to create a character and Pac-Man was born.
"If the dots are pills, does that mean Pac-Man's a junkie?"
After:
The game was originally released in Japan under the name Puck Man in 1980. The game got a lukewarm response due to more popular games such as Space Invaders.
- Captain, we're losing ships, what should we do?
- Drop down, increase speed, REVERSE DIRECTION!!!
Later that year, Bally of Midway manufactured the game under the altered title Pac-Man thinking that vandals would change the P in Puck Man to an F making it "Fuck Man".
"Puck Man sure likes gobbling balls."
The game was a huge success bringing in lots of revenue and creating lots of popularity. It was so good it had a top 40 song named after it called "Pac-Man Fever."
"Video Gamers rejoice!"
The game went on to sell over 350,000 units becoming one of the top selling arcade games of all time. Originally a bootlegged game called Crazy Otto, Ms. Pac-Man was the unofficial sequel to Pac-Man produced by Midway. The game was the original Pac-Man game, but with improvements. This game was also a huge success becoming one of the highest selling arcade games of all time.
"Insert ball joke here."
There are many ports of Pac-Man, but only one I want to talk about. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, the biggest mistake in video game history. Atari got the rights to produce a port for Pac-Man in the late 1970's. They thought it would be easy to produce the game thinking the game was popular because of it's gameplay and not graphics. They had a prototype ready by late 1981, but to capitalize on the game for the 1981 holiday season, they decided to release the prototype. At the time, there were only 10 million active Atari 2600's being used, but Atari made 12 million copies of the game thinking every Atari 2600 owner would buy the game and 2 million people would buy the system just to play the game with predicted sales to be 500 million dollars. The game only sold 5 million copies leaving 7 million leftover. The game was awful and is often blamed along with E.T. The Extra Terrestrial for the video game crash of 1983."
"Shame! SHAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
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