True story; my Mom was somehow gifted with the ability to absolutely dominate the 2600 version of Pacman. She was horrible at every other video game, including the official coin-op version of Pacman. But somehow, some way, she could play this 2600 version for hours without getting killed, even when the ghosts became insanely quick. The neighbor kids would even come over and watch in amazement. Unexplainable... EDIT: My mother is now 75 and just underwent triple bypass surgery. I don't know how much longer she will be with me, but I had to show her this overwhelming response. Thank you to everyone.
My grandmother and mother would play Pac-Man against each other all the time (it was also the only video game they played). Apparently, after a certain score (5000?), the ghosts would start moving in a predictable pattern, so it was possible to play almost indefinitely. At that point the ghosts were moving so fast that there was very little room for error, and if you made a mistake it was very difficult to recover. If they played long enough, the game would malfunction and become unplayable (basically a kill screen). I don't know how they found the pattern, but once they did a single game could last hours.
I was the same way. This Pac-Man, myself and my dad could play for hours. But I also beat ET, Sword Quest (the first in the series) and went very far in Defender and I sucked at the arcade Pac-Man and Defender. But the games were built differently for difficulty and the switches allowed for different options in game play. Although I was not aware of it at the time and they almost always stayed on the normal settings for the switches. Also we had the station wagon wood grain and the black plastic version of the 2600, back in the day
@@hiroshimatwinkie5571they played the 2600 version or another? In the arcade, half the screen would glitch, due to a bug after so many points or levels reached. You could still play it, if you had memorized the maze. They even made a whole game with that purpose in mind.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I were fully aware the Atari 2600 versions of arcade games were way inferior to the arcade versions. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command. We expected no less for Pac-Man. But for some of us, we couldn't afford to keep putting quarters in machines. This is what we settled for
Yup....but even then, we knew the home version of Pac-Man was terrible. Atari game graphics we're always going to be a step down, but the gameplay was usually still quality. Pac-Man.... wasn't. Maze Craze was a hundred times better, and we quickly went back to that.
And we liked it! Don't get me wrong, some games were worse than others, and Pac-Man was a bit of a disappointment. But it must be remembered that until popular consoles like the 2600 arrived, TV was a completely passive medium. You sat, you watched whatever was on, all you could do was change the channel. But this new technology put the viewer in control of the action on the screen for the first time. It was thrilling, especially as a child. We didn't sit around pissed off that our videogames didn't look like Call of Duty because there was no Call of Duty. We marveled at the videogames we DID have, because they were state of the art.
@@dondrapersayswhat This is very true. It's also amazing to think that we put about as much time into the games as people put into call of duty these days
I remember it got the point where I was playing for two or three hours, got to several hundred points and had to cut it off. There was no point to continuing. Sometimes when playing, I encountered a bug where Pacman would go through the tunnel, then float through the walls and ghostbox over and over.
As an eleven year old, I knew this was a shitty port of Pac-Man, but the fact that my friend and I could play this at his house meant we overlooked all the flaws. I can still hear the each of the sounds, and they ring with nostalgia.
I was nine and my friends dad was a manager at Kmart and brought it home for us to play. I remember thinking, this doesn’t look right, why are the ghosts flickering? Then I heard that Do DO DO Do sound when it started and I was like what is this? I played it anyway.
I think part of the reason you can still hear the sounds is that movies and TV shows _still_ use sound effects from the Atari 2600 versions of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong whenever they need to create an arcade din.
That was the whole point of the 2600. You could play games at home for the first time, although the quality wasn't as high as the arcades. I remember the 5200 had a close to arcade quality about it, and then, of course, Nintendo's NES was the one that kind of achieved parity with arcades at the time.
The irony is, the sound effects of that and the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong are still used TODAY when someone's playing any random video game in a movie. So those of us who played it back then still get PTSD from hearing it in the movies.
I still remember the disappointment of going to me cousin’s house to play this and we spent maybe 15 minutes with it before going straight to Combat. On a good note, it taught us to educate ourselves before buying ANYTHING.
Similar story here! For me, it was around 1986, went to a kindergarten friend's house for a sleepover to play PacMan and I remember being so UTTERLY disappointed. This disappointment eventually fueled my skipping on asking for the Atari for Christmas a year later (Went for the Nintendo)
When it came out, I bought this game for my 2600 unit and I really didn't mind the differences because I was able to play the game, such as it was, in my home. I saved money in the long run (after springing for the cost of the cartridge) because I didn't have to pump quarters into an arcade machine. It was a different version of the arcade game, but at the time I had fun with the Atari version of Pac-Man.
Yeah, this is roughly me too. I was old enough to have played the arcade version, but not a lot, and I had plenty of fun with the Atari version. The fact that it wasn't the arcade version was not that important to me. I'd say I got my money's worth.
A huge improvement, yes. Still some flicker, but greatly reduced and it has 4 ghosts instead of only two, among other improvements. th-cam.com/video/CYjSI4Pnh7M/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VovbcVvZxtNed1cQ
@@MyWeirdRecordCollection The 2600's Jr. Pac-Man was, amazingly, developed by the same team who created the "Pac-Man ROM hack" which later became Ms. Pac-Man-widely considered the best Pac-Man game of the arcade era. Anyway those guys were brilliant, which explains why Jr. Pac-Man on 2600 was such a triumph of development.
Two things I and many other Atari fans wish people would STOP SAYING (and implying): - Atari 2600 Pac-Man contributed to the video game crash of '83. NO, IT DID NOT. AT ALL. Neither did E.T. - The "it was so bad that unsold copies were buried in Alamogordo." The Alamogordo landfill was a dumping ground for *all* of Atari's extra stock, not just Pac-Man. As the video correctly points out, there were plenty of instances of some of Atari's most popular titles there as well (including hardware). Also, the Atari 2600 couldn't have won an award from Sears for 1976 because it didn't exist until 1977. Now...I was seven years old when Pac-Man came out for the 2600, and I can tell ya....I was (and still am) a major Pac-Man fan, and I wasn't ignorant: I knew right away that the 2600 game looked nothing like the arcade version I was lucky to play only once a month, if that. But I also knew that the Atari 2600 was very limited and that programmers could only do so much. For Christmas 1982, my parents got my older brother and me the Atari 2600 (which shocked the HELL out of me because I didn't think my parents would ever allow video games in the house -- my brother had a pong console in the late '70s and they made him get rid of it!), and they also bought Pac-Man and put it in the box. I gotta tell ya: I played the HELL out of that version of Pac-Man. I knew full well that it wasn't the same: the colors were way off, the sound was weird, no cut scenes, only one bonus prize that never changed, no separate monst--uhh, ghost-- AI, etc. But I still played it for hours on end and loved it. Because if I wanted to play Pac-Man, that was my only choice, unless I wanted to wait for our monthly trips to the mall and I could play it at Aladdin's Castle. Some tidbits: - The "ghosts" in the 2600 version actually have *two* colors -- in fact, it's pretty clear in the video -- not one. It's just that 1) the colors are so close and 2) the flicker is so distracting that you can't really tell. - The enemies were always called "monsters" in the arcade version. In fact, check the arcade bezels for not just Pac-Man but also Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, and Jr. Pac-Man -- they all say "monsters." (Even the original Japanese versions -- do a Japanese-to-English translation, and it comes up as "monsters.") The reason they're called "ghosts" on the Atari 2600 version is *because of* the flicker, making them kind of see-thru. (Kinda like how many Intellivision cartridge manuals disguised bugs in their games as surprise features; I forgot the exact wording they used.) - Many have found that if you flip the TV Type switch on the console to B&W, it actually looks a LOT better! (I tend to agree.) - Tod Frye said that the two things that really made the game so limited: 1) as the video says, the game being on an only 4k cart, and 2) that TPTB demanded that the game have two-player options. If just one of those two items had been conceded, we may have ended up with a much better game. - The maze is basically rotated to fit the 4:3 aspect of a TV screen. When you think about it that way, it makes sense that 1) the tunnels are on the top and bottom instead of the sides, and 2) the ghosts exit their pen from the right instead of the top. And this only occurred to me now. There's a conspiracy theory out there that Coleco made their Atari 2600 ports intentionally poor just to kind of lure people to their more arcade-accurate ColecoVision console and titles. Of course, the contractors who developed the games for Coleco vehemently deny that, and for many, many reasons I believe them. Now...the Pac-Man games for Atari's 8-bit computers and the 5200 were MUCH better and quite arcade-accurate. Why has there been no conspiracy theory that Atari intentionally made the 2600 Pac-Man bad in hopes to influence sales of their more expensive units??
Not that a corporate sabotage theory needs to be believable to exist, but intentionally making a crappy version of a beloved game for your company's best selling system would be suicide. Even if it made the 5200 look better by comparison, that makes it look like Atari is admitting their 2600 is shit. Atari was surprisingly generous with their software ports on other systems, as they should have been. Pac Man was pretty decent on Intellivision and I remember enjoying Centipede on Colecovision. This is wise as it portrayed Atari as a competent manufacturer of software, no matter the hardware. I think what helps promote the urban legend that Coleco intentionally made crappy software for other systems is that they never really made much good software for the competitors. Donkey Kong on the 2600 makes sense given the hardware and memory limitations, but the Donkey Kong on Intellivision just looked and played beyond atrocious. Atari 2600 Zaxon was awful, Moustrap was more underwhelming than Pac Man, and most Coleco software on the other systems barring Venture were lackluster (to my knowledge.) I doubt it was an intentional decision of sabotage, but it gave the impression Coleco didn't prioritize anything but Colecovision.
My younger brother and I had a 2600 early on in the late 70s, but when we'd argue over what to play, my parents put their foot down and said if it didn't stop, they'd sell it. And when we didn't stop, they did. In 1982 they got another one for us for Christmas after my brother and I grew up some more, along with 4 cartridges--Adventure, Space Invaders, Warlords, and Missile Command. The first two were ridiculously good classics, Warlords was great 1v1 off and on, and Missile Command was great at torturing our hands, because we could play it for hours before finally dying. When Pac-Man came out, we were deeply disappointed. Not as disappointed as at Raiders of the Lost Ark or Sword Quest, but I digress.
"Atari 2600 Pac-Man contributed to the video game crash of '83. NO, IT DID NOT. AT ALL. Neither did E.T." Based on what exactly? When your triple-A games are absolute garbage, it impacts your business.
Funny how the programmer and the others who raised the alarm are the only ones who are mentioned by name but the executives who are directly responsible for tanking the company remain safely incognito. I would also bet that they got nice cushy jobs after leaving Atari.
My parents put this in my Easter basket when I was 10 or so. I didn’t care how it looked, I was playing PacMan at home. Thanks Mom and Dad! Good memories.
This is actually the reaction of most people who don't have 40 years of hindsight to look through. I knew it looked bad at the time, but my friends and I still played it and had fun!
Thanks for not blaming Tod Frye, he is a competent programmer and he did the best he could do with such limited resources. If only they allowed him to use a 8K cartridge the game would have been much better, as Ms. Pac-Man demonstrated.
@@jimboAndersenReviews Frye was also working on a routine aimed to reduce the flickering of the ghosts. He was almost done with it, he only needed a few more days, but Atari executives were inflexible.
@@grandetaco4416 Atari did actually outsource Ms. Pac-Man to an external team of developers, General Computer Corporation. Incidentally, the same company had previously worked on the arcade version, no wonder they knew what they were doing.
There were still tons of other limits in the hardware even 8k could not fix, the hardware by then was outdated and showed its age, Pacman was the first popular game not portable anymore more or less. It is a wonder that they were able to pull off a decent Space Invaders port that kept the console alive longer than it should have. If they 5200 would have been in place in 82 like planned originally Pacman would have been a home run and a system seller. The atari 8 bit home computer port of the game was one of the best if not the best port of the game to any system of that year!
This game was responsible for the day where I was the coolest kid in 3rd grade. This game was *impossible* to find when it first came out. My mom and I happened to be at Lionel Playworld one day after school and a guy was stocking the shelves with Pac Man cartridges. Mom was super frugal, but she knew how big a deal this was and bought it for me. I invited a few friends over to play it, and they called their friends, and pretty soon the whole neighborhood knew I had the only copy of PacMan anyone had seen. There must have been 30 kids at my house that afternoon, including a bunch of people I didn't even know.
I would have been happy just to have this version in our home. We couldn't afford gaming consoles. My first console wasn't until the Nintendo NES. I was a junior in college in 1992 when a roommate couldn't afford rent and he traded me it and about 30 games for one month rent. He moved out the next month.
Our 2600 was a hand me down and came with a few games including pac man, this was probably around early to mid 80's. This thing was a big part of our childhood, me and my cousins would play for hours.
Poverty builds resilience. Don't be bitter about it. I'm an engineer, what we are working on is to make everything available for everybody. We will reduce the cost of EVERY luxury to nothing in time. You can play the arcade original today with the MAME simulator, if you care to. Whatever device you are using this to read on is capable of doing this simulation.
I remember seeing the 2600 version on display at Montgomery Ward. My mom and I were walking through the store and I saw that the store had it set up to play. I remember asking the salesman what it was. He said that it was Pac Man. I said, no it wasn't. There was a Pac Man cabinet outside of the store (the store was attached to a mall and you couldn't walk too far without being able to play one of those machines. They were EVERYWHERE. I told the man that Pac Man was out in the hallway and that the game on the Atari wasn't Pac Man. I was 6 at the time and was not fooled.
@@Lou-yf1jo- I'm a few years older, so I was around at the time and had the game, and the story is entirely plausible -- Pac Man for the 2600 was trash. I played it 3 or 4 times and threw the cartridge in a box in the back of my closet.
As a kid who played Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, it seemed pretty great at the time. MUCH closer than say the "port" of Zaxxon, which was not even recognizable as the same game.
I grew up in this era and my experience was different. We didnt really care aboit the differences, we were just stoked we could play video games at home. We even played the hell out of game abominations like ET and Pitfall ... In those times, graphics and background colors didn't matter to us, but then again we were just kids
I was born in 1975 and a kid who had Pac-Man, ET, and a bunch of other games for the Atari 2600. I thought it was great and didn't know about the negative reviews or that the game could have better. I knew the arcade version was better, but having it at home and not needing to put quarters in to play was great. I loved it at the time.
How could you not notice how different it was? I was 12 in ‘82 and knew that this game was barely a shadow of the arcade version. That being said, I already knew that the 2600 wasn’t capable of full arcade emulation and accepted the poor quality as a necessary tradeoff for getting to play it at home.
I listened to an interview with Tod Frye, and he shared a lot of what you mentioned here... lack of rom space, rushed development, blue background. It was also clear that he didn't have a lot a familiarity with the source material. He mentioned that the tunnels were placed at the top and bottom rather than the sides because it was much easier to program, and he thought it was "good enough". Fortunately we ended up with Ms Pac-Man awhile later, and it was a much much better game than this one.
Ironically, the tunnels are in the same place they are in the arcade game (in the middle of the "long sides" of the screen) ... they just turned the REST of the stuff, probably because they figured they'd have parents screaming at them if their kids started turning the family TV on its side.
When I was young in the 80's I thought that the other Pac Man games were just improved versions as I actually thought that ATARI 2600 was the original.
This is a good and informative video, but the main point can be made very quickly: Atari rightly assumed that Pac-Man would sell millions of copies just because it was Pac-Man, and regardless of quality. That’s why the company didn’t bother sinking the right resources into it. It’s a lesson in corporate greed.
And not the only one from Atari. They did the same thing with E.T. I've never been to business school but if Atari isn't taught as a cautionary tale there, I'd be shocked.
The whole "Atari Pacman and ET helped crash the industry" bit is overblown. I got both those games in 82.. with my Atari...we played em a lot. Never complained. Still love both of em, and still enjoy playing em. 1982 was 5 years into the 2600 VCS life... by 83, the system was old news. 83 was also the year of the Cabbage Patch kid.. Atari was not a hit toy anymore... Also, the arcade crash in 83-84 was not due to Atari..again, it was seen as a fad thar had run out of steam. Space Invaders, Pac Man.. all those golden age games were already in the rear view mirror. PacMan Fever had cooled off. Also, the glut of cheap unlicened shovelware that flooded stores after the Activision lawsuit probably did alot more to erode the confidence in the Atari than Pacman and ET.
That seems to make more sense, the big hit console videogame was no longer popular, but companies kept pumping games for it, bad ones too, to make quick buck, so they lost money badly on it, and burned consumers. Feels less the fault of a couple of games and just... the way some fads go.
At age 12 I was at a launch promotion at a children's museum and I was allowed to play it once in a high score competition. I thought it was poor quality. I was raised to be critical of hype and this reinforced that. I came home with some promotional items from it that I kept for years but don't think I have anymore.
There were some decent arcade/2600 ports. Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missile Command were good. Defender was quirky but playable, and Berzerk and Wizard of Wor were fun. Ms.Pac Man was surprisingly good. The Atari Pac-Man, well, it was, as mentioned, fun to be able to play Pac Man at home but it was certainly not very good. Generally as Arcade games became more sophisticated, the 2600 ports became less and less able to emulate them satisfactorily.
I still vividly remember the shit-eating grin on my little brother's face when he came home with my mom from the store the day she bought the game. We played that thing for days, years. We watched the cartoon. It wasn't until the rise of TH-cam that I learned how disappointed I and everyone else supposedly was by the 2600 version.
I was old enough to love Pac Man when it came out in the arcade, but not old enough to understand why the 2600 version wasn't a faithful replica when games like Asteroids were reasonably close. I was heartbroken at the 2600 version. It was such a letdown. It neither looked, sounded nor played like the arcade.
It was my awakening that "games aren't like the cover art, nor are they like the Arcade"...But to be fair I was pretty young so I just grabbed the sloppy joystick and rolled with it...Great times.. occasionally you'd go to your mates who had a Vectrex or Oddysey and be blown away...
I worked with Todd (years later), super good dude. He did better than anyone else could have at the time. And you just need to check out Ms. Pac-Man for the 2600 to see what "could have been" with a bigger ROM -- it was pretty nice.
I loved Pac-Man 2600 growing up! Still play it to this day. I mean what did people expect? That the 2600 would exactly reproduce the arcade graphics? That was naive thinking during the 80s. They shouldn't have complained about the 5200 either 😍
i remember owning pac-man for the atari2600 as a kid in the 80's. i didn't care if was best port of pac-man. i played it a lot over the years until i got the nes. i do remember that one of my brother's friends show us that there was a glitch in the game where you go up & down on the screen. over the years i forgot how to do it
This game shows that development crunch, rushed games, and out-of-touch and greedy publishers with short-term thinking is not a new thing in the video game industry. They've been there since almost the start. And thinking like that didn't just happen right before a crash. Publishers have been like this after Nintendo resurrected the console business up to this very day, all those 40 years!
Despite most of the games being objectively bad, a lot of people still have nostalgia for the 2600. I have a disk of old Atari games for my Xbox that I play from time to time.
This game had nothing to do with the crash of Atari and the video game industry. The 2600 version of Pac Man was well received and a great version for the home console. The 2600 console which sold with this game includd sold out at every distributor. Although the 'crash' was ultimately blamed on the release of E.T. - and justly so (thanks Spielberg); the true crash of the industry was Atari licensing rights to far too many companies who flooded the market with crap. In retrospect; Apple Computer (in the day) demanding anything licensed to their computer platform (all software) would carry the badge of Apple approval and guarantee the quality and compatibility of software. Although this imperialistic method was frowned upon in the day; ultimately, it kept Apple Computer alive and customers happy with compatibility guaranteed as the operating systems evolved. Too many TH-camrs are making 'history of video game and computer' videos having never experienced it first hand, and simply regurgitating nonsense read on wikipedia.
Back then it was standard operating procedure for games to be made by a single programmer. In fact it probably would have been difficult to add more, given that on the 2600 they were written in Assembly.
@@JamesChatting It wasn't the E.T. programmer. Howard Warshaw did E.T. in five weeks, when most games at that time took 3-6 months. When given enough time he wrote some classic games.
That's why I love playing the arcade Coin-Op version. I miss playing River Raid for the Atari 2600. I got up to 10,xxx points and took a polaroid picture of the screen, sent in the pic, and got my patch. Lost my patch some years later. Might have looked cool on a baseball cap, tho.
I remember when Ms. Pac Man came out on 2600 and I was pleasantly surprised how much better it was than Pac Man. Back in the day, you had to have the expectation that Atari 2600 games came no where close to the arcade. I believe arcade like expectations increased when Colecovision entered the picture.
Honestly, well into the 90s we all knew we were getting an inferior product, even masterful ports like the SNES version of the SF2 games were clearly compromises. Other than the Neo Geo, of course, AFAIC, the first time a home console managed to consistently provide ports that legitimately matched the arcade was the Dreamcast, which managed to more or less carbon copy a slew of NAOMI games (and Sammy's Atomiswave cabinets were essentially modified DCs, which made them extremely easy to port as well); tragically, arcades themselves were essentially dead within three years of its launch, so we barely even had a chance to fully enjoy the development. I miss almost everything about that time.
4:02 The dots being the same color as the wall was not "to save memory." Both elements were rendered with the 2600's "background layer", as this is the only _reasonable_ way on the 2600 to render several dozen individual small elements (the dots). You can only assign one color for this layer, though 2600 software engineers quickly figured out that you could change values like those on a per-scanline (or sometimes faster) basis. When it comes to the background layer, effectively the best you can get is a new color per scanline. There is a video of an electronics convention where Tod Frye sees this technique in action in the homebrew "Pac-Man 8K" and laments that he wasn't able to figure out that trick in time for his version. That's the reason why his Pac-Man, and every contemporaneous Pac-Man clone on the VCS that also used the background layer, have the dots and maze the same color. This was not dictated by memory constraints. It was simply not in the bag of tricks in 1982 or indeed arguably before the homebrew scene. 4:08 The ghosts _are_ actually different colors, but unfortunately most of the chosen colors are only _slightly_ different from one another, and they certainly aren't a match for the arcade. I assume the colors were chosen so that they would stand out well against the blue background, especially on old early 80s TVs displaying an RF signal. The footage of the 2600 Pac-Man you have provided does an unavoidably poor job of representing even the already miserable output the game manages, as your video is 24fps and this is thoroughly incompatible with the 60Hz of the 2600's output. (And you seem to have started with 30fps footage in the first place, which discarded every other frame of video.) That said, you can still very plainly see in your footage that one of the visible ghosts is light green and the other is light orange. As for the overall jank of the game, let me be blunt: Todd Frye was perpetually high, and also a bit of a mental case, as revealed in the documentary _Once Upon Atari._ I feel comfortable attributing most of the bizarre design choices to that. The hopeless repetitiveness of the maze, the complete disregard of the arcade game's sound design, the fact that Pac-Man now has an eye and-somehow-an underbite, and particularly, the fact that what used to be a memorable opening tune has transformed into a quick blip of "music" which, despite lasting only four notes, somehow manages to evoke Schoenberg in its utter discordance. Seriously, how do we go from the classic Pac-Man jingle to what may casually be described as a cat walking across a dialup phone's keypad? The answer is drugs.
they (ATARI) couldn't even make dots.... they were fuggin rectangle squares like ziti pasta. the fruit replaced by a big square. the one portal at top/bottom. and the sounds were awful and headache inducing, with Pac-Man mouth stuck in one direction, to the left at all times. game was a failure. 3/10
@@crokkadoodledoo9956 Indeed. As I said before, the dots more or less _had_ to be rendered by the 2600's "background layer." This is a feature of the hardware intended to display simple things like lines in _Pong (Video Olympics) or barriers in _Tank (Combat)._ The resolution of this layer is extremely low: One fourth of the console's total horizontal resolution, which explains why you can only get "wafer" shaped dots. There's no good explanation for why the fruit is now what the manual describes as a "vitamin," other than that there probably wasn't enough ROM to store almost ten different fruit spites and Tod may have felt that having a single, generic object was an acceptable compromise. There actually is a 2600 game which attempted to use sprites to render proper dots _(Alien,_ which they made into a _Pac-Man_ clone). To achieve this, they had to stagger the vertical positions of the dots, so ultimately they don't line up in straight rows like you'd expect. It's... an interesting proof of concept. Ironically, I could make the case for _Alien_ being the best attempt at a _Pac-Man_ like game that the 2600 saw before the homebrew scene.
Many of us just accepted that there were a lot of restrictions to the 2600 console. It isn't as if there were a ton of high quality graphic titles for the machine. So that was basically as good as it was gonna get. Pitfall might have been the top of what it could do. So people expected more than it could possibly ever produce.
There is a homebrew 8k rom version for the 2600 that is much closer to the arcade version that proves the hardware was much more capable. So many fond memories of the 80's but we all tend to forget the extreme greed of the era.
The two video games I know with the most versions are Pac-Man and Tetris. I have played literally _dozens_ of each, just in the DOS era! For Pac-Man there were ASCII-art versions, versions made in QBASIC, monochrome versions, CGA versions, VGA versions. Versions with completely new gameplay mechanics and rules, and ones that were very faithful to the arcade original. I think I even played one that supported local multiplayer. I think Tetris and Pac-Man are probably the most common games that people would pick to try their hand at programming.
I'll never forget the hype for Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 when I was 7 years old. even my old neighbors bought the console after hearing that Pac-Man was coming out. The very next day they put the system and their 3 games in a box and threw it in their basement. Even at 7 years, I understood the disappointment. I'd blame this quick and loose port of a hugely popular arcade game for the crash before anything else, including E.T. and I had E.T. and I played it 3x more than that horrendous Pac-Man port. A very decent Ms. Pac-Man port came out when it was already too late.
I remember the first time I've ever played an Atari 2600 and this version of Pac Man was the first version I've ever played. It was fine for what it was and I remember it for being the first video game I've ever played. Amongst the games I remember playing on the Atari 2600 when I was a young kid were Asteroids, The Empire Strikes Back and Berserk.
People who think that the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man was a disaster should play the Tomy handheld Pac-Man game. It's so bad that it makes the 2600 Pac-Man look good. I have played a few handheld versions of Pac-Man but the Tomy version is the worst. It cost about fifty dollars but wasn't worth fifty cents. At least the 2600 Pac-Man was free. It cost nothing. People did have to pay for it at first but Atari started including it for free with the Atari 2600 console. The Atari 2600 Pac-Man wasn't great but the Atari 5200 Pac-Man was awesome. It was almost as good as the arcade Pac-Man.
I'll never forget the profound let-down I experienced when I got this version on my Atari after spending months glued to the arcade version. I just couldn't believe it.
As a 3 year old I loved playing it and had no idea it was a bad port until seeing other versions later... Maybe that was the target audience in reality😅
I have fond memories of the Atari PacMan. We got a free copy with the purchase of the 2600 system, but since it was through a coupon we had to wait. Some months later I picked up the morning mail from the side of the house, completely oblivious to the small Atari cartridge-sized bubble envelope in that day's drop as I went back to playing the games we already had. When my mom finally opened the package to reveal our treasure, we went right to it. Disappointing sound and graphics, for sure. And PacMan's mouth didn't even go up or down. But I did end up playing it so much I figured out a pattern when the game speed was at its max where I couldn't lose. Never wrote it down, so it's now lost to time.
I had just started high school when PacMan for the 2600 arrived. My memory of PacMan for the Atari 2600 was that it accentuated how far apart arcade tech from home console tech had become. Games like Space Invaders and Berzerk ported over very well, but PacMan was clearly a more graphically-advanced game that was, it seemed, too much for our aging 2600s. It made our home console appear obsolete and more difficult to return to after playing the arcades, which now had even more advanced titles like Popeye, Pole Position, and Galaga. Where Adventure's primitive graphics were actually part of its charm, it just made our favorite muncher look bad.
Adventure was my favorite game on the Atari 2600. It's the only game I ever had where I discovered the easter egg embedded within. If you put enough items in one of the screens, you could go through the wall and find a message that stated who the game was created by. I'm 57 now and still have that cartridge as a decoration in my gaming room. It's the only relic I kept from my Atari 2600 days.
12:02 That's the homebrew version of _Donkey Kong_ for the VCS and it is excellent. Anyway, the average development time for an Atari 2600 game was 3 to 6 months, so Todd Frye's work on _Pac-Man_ was not necessarily rushed.* What surprises me is that Atari didn't seem to put too much importance on getting the best programmer for such a popular arcade title. In fact, Todd and his team partner Bob Polaro (they shared office space) were allowed to choose who got _Pac-Man_ and who got _Defender._ Todd let Bob choose and Bob took _Defender_ because he didn't see how Todd could make _Pac-Man_ work on the system. Todd says that he was actually working on a "variable flicker" system that would have been one of the very first of its kind for the system and would have dramatically reduced flicker. But, he was sort of on probation at the company at the time and needed to get the game out so he abandoned the idea. The homebrew version of _Pac-Man_ for the 2600 is called _Pac-Man 8K_ and it uses variable flicker (and is amazing). Here's a much older Todd Frye admiring it: th-cam.com/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/w-d-xo.htmlsi=1gFtpE41XBi8iVX9 It's fantastic but it's worth keeping mind that homebrew authors can take as long as they want to develop their games to perfect them, unlike those who worked back in the day. * I'll tell you what was rushed: Howard Scott Warshaw's _E.T._ was given 5 WEEKS to finish in order to be ready for the holiday rush. The fact he was able to complete anything playable is amazing.
You're implying that ET was playable. It wasn't. It was a hot mess and it was darned near impossible for me as a kid to figure it out. All I did was run around til I got bored.
@@michaelmeyer2725 It's not a great game, but there are walk-thrus* here on TH-cam that show how to complete it. Just saying that for a game that was developed in only 5 weeks (a fraction of the average development time) it is impressive. The main frustration with the game is falling in those %$^#%&# pits! But once you learn the proper way to get out without immediately falling back in, it's not too bad. * Such as this one: th-cam.com/video/QmrQkQsM9FU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=NcMvs0KrMjzaAlvt
The people running Atari after Bushnell sold it to Warner Communications were not from the entertainment business. (Bushnell got very frustrated with his new corporate masters and left after signing a non-compete agreement.) The man installed as CEO, Ray Kassar, had made most of his career in textiles and notoriously regarded the programmers as no better than 'towel designers'. Despite very good salaries and royalties, this disdain is what drove away some of Atari's best talent to start their own companies, Activision and Imagic. (Ron Fulop, the initial core talent at Imagic, had invented the bankswitching technique that enable greater than 4K cartridges to be used on the 2600.) Atari had no provision in their platform design for controlling and profiting from third party publishers. At best, good games from the new publishers made the platform more popular but that wasn't much help compared to the competition for gaming sales and the loss of talent. Parker Bros. having a huge hit with Frogger on the 2600 raised the profile of the machine but the money went to Parker Bros. and Sega.
@@epobirs It's kind of a bummer that bank switching even had to be used. The 6507 can natively address 8K, but they used a cartridge interface that had one less address line, meaning 4K was the new max. Good thing this was figured out, though. The fairly recent game "Circus Convoy" is actually a 32K game. Anyway, the limited hardware actually allowed for extreme flexibility which is one reason it lasted so long.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Similarly, the Atari 800 version of Mario Brothers, while quite good, was never released under Warner because it needed a 20KB ROM and they were not willing to do that added cost at the time. It was eventually released on the XEGS console descendant of the Atari 8-bit computers. It was better than the 7800 version despite the advantage on the 7800 side. Another case of talent making the difference, I suppose. AFAIK, the first game cartridge that made use of bank switching on the Atari computers (and the 5200) was Bounty Bob Strikes Back, the sequel to Miner 2049'er. It was a 40KB game but playable on an 8K RAM system.
I wasn't old enough to know how it was judged by critics I just loved the game. I have spent more time with the 2600 version than any other version. In fact I still emulate it more than any other version. Those horrible colors, square pucks, flickering ghosts, they just bring back good memories.
For all the flak ET gets on the 2600 it's still one of my fondest memories of the 2600. It was a rather large and complicated game for it's time. You knew if it was a nurse or a guy in a suit that was chasing you or the kid when he came to rescue you. You knew you were hiding in a house/building. You went around purposely looking for parts to fix your ship. I beat it a couple of times.
Hi fellow ET enjoyer! I beat ET a bunch too, that game gave me a perspective and appreciation for open world exploration that I still enjoy in games now
@@eldrichnemo9312 I like Arkanoid and similar games where you break the walls and get power ups. And I absolutely loved Berzerk. Although the cover art vs the game felt really off. However a lot of games did that
While Pac-Man for Atari takes a lot of shit these days rightfully so it is a bad port. It’s sold well and for the time for an arcade port to a home console it really didn’t disappoint. Nobody thought they were going to get the arcade game when they plugged Pac-Man Into their system. Everybody who owned it was just happy to have Pac-Man at their house.
I worked for a CEO in 2001 at a company that WASN'T Atari. This CEO worked at Atari at the time Pac-Man was made. He said that (paraphrasing here) Namco was jerking them around on licensing the game to them. They had some deadline that they had to meet for the game to ship in some crucial window for sales. That date would fall on a Monday. Namco approved the license on the FRIDAY before that date, and the programmer wrote the game over the weekend. You might think that this CEO was just making up stories, but I also asked him "Are there really E T carts in a landfill?" And he confirmed that there ABSOLUTELY were, as he was there when it happened. Keep in mind this is 2001, back when this story was just urban legend, but it then turned out to be true.
Todd Fry did NOT write it in a weekend, which would have been flat out impossible. He wrote it in 6 months based on everything I ever heard. CEO sounds like he was out of touch with what was going on in development.
@@sa3270and the Atari 2600 was not really able to do better graphically. People go on about how ms pacman and pacman jr are so much better. They might play better, but they look terrible too
ET Landfill thing was never a legend the whole thing was major news at the time it happen and was in all the tv news channels and news papers at the time and hell Nolan even said so in every major interview he was in that ask him that question it's just idiots where just lazy and failed to look it up
I had the Atari 2600 and Pac-man. I still have the stuff in a box somewhere. I don’t remember having a problem with it at the time. I guess I thought it was the best they could do with the technology at the time. I had Ms.Pac-man. The good old days.
When people talk about the Video Game Crash of '83, they always simplify it to Atari ET and Atari Pacman when really it was for multiple reasons and not because of two shitty games.
Home computers were beginning to come on to the market at that time. I'd imagine that they would've been the bigger killer. Consoles were only good for playing games, but a computer could do more. If I were around then I'd probably be more interested in buying a computer even if a computer was more expensive since it would have been more useful than a console.
@@twistedyogert Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Home computers were another factor in the Video Game Crash of ‘83. This was why when the NES came out in America, it was marketed more as a toy than a video game console. In Internet Historian’s video on R.O.B., he talked about a prototype for the NES that was presented at a video game convention where it looked more like a personal computer, but when they figured out that it was a video game console, they lost interest and didn’t want it to be sold so Nintendo had to go back to the drawing board to think of different ways to appeal to Americans.
Honestly it was pretty simple. It was because of hundreds of shitty games. The 2600 was packed full of shovelware that could be amusing for a playtime of maybe five minutes... My definition of a good 2600 game was a game that could be called a game. Montezuma's Revenge, Enduro, Pressure Cooker.... ET of all things is actually one of the best games on the system, but only after you know how the hell to play the thing. It's incomprehensible garbo otherwise. (Seriously, it's a really nice little scavenger hunt game that feels a like it has some variety from it randomized nature. I think the scavenger hunt genre was massively under used on the console.) The Famicom and SG-1000 came out that year, and showed that video games didn't have to suck. That they could have more than one screen. That they could have colors and actual ART. Atari failed because the suits didn't care about games. If the 5200 was actually good and they cared about creating value for themselves by establishing franchises, they could have continued to be somebody. It's a shame, considering their arcade division was really pretty neat. How does a company like that produce Gauntlet. The divisions really were like two completely separate organizations...
The C64 and Apple 2e killed the first generation of consoles. Nintendo and Sega brought consoles back. Since then it's been a constant with PC and console gaming.
This has been lingering on my mind ever since I was a kid. 2600 pacman looked so differently than arcade version and it really bothered me for the past 40 years. Now, I am glad to hear the full story. Thanks for this video.
The key word there is homebrew. You can make a change in code and see the result 10 milliseconds later, you have all the information you could possibly want on the internet about how the system works and all the programming techniques used in the last 45 years. You work in a modern IDE with copy/paste/undo, multiple source files with comments and long, descriptive label and function names. You have all the time in the world with no pressure from a boss. The guys working back then would have to wait half an hour for the code to assemble, then wait for someone to burn a ROM to find out if the change they made worked, while figuring out on the fly how to make 1977 home hardware do what cutting edge arcade hardware was only able to do by 1980/81. With all that said Tod Frye didn't do himself any favours - he didn't push himself because he didn't really seem to like the game. It was just a job, and like any profession there will be those who do 'just enough' and those who go above and beyond. I'm sure if he cared enough he could at the very least have convinced them it should have a black background, but he didn't.
@@arlasoft They gave him restraints that foiled this version. Not just the black background but the time and memory limitations. It wasn't entirely the programers fault
Disastrous? Laughable. We as kids in the 80s enjoyed Pacman, E.T. and Space Invaders alike, MASSIVELY. true, the sprites flicker on Pacman, but other than that, it's a fine game.
The reason for the name change, from Puck-Man to Pac-Man, was due to their knowledge that idiots would change the Letter "P" in Puck to the 6th letter of the alphabet. Thus, we have Pac-Man in the U.S.
@@jsmith3946 Actually, I am 49 years old, and grew up in that era. Therefore, I possess quite the knowledge for video game history and trivia. Furthermore, when you know the true story how one man saved Nintendo from losing their beloved gorilla via a lawsuit, let me know.
I remember doing chores for $1, then running down to to PW Super market to get 4 plays of PacMan in the early 80’s. I had an atari 2600 and was so disappointed with their version of PacMan
I don't know where you got that date of 1979 of Pac-Man in Japan, it was released in 1980 in Japan. Also, your video footage of the 2600 version of the game has a frameskip happening or the interlaced capture is just dropping every other frame so you only see 2 ghosts on screen in your video. Lastly, what's with the homemade MAME cabinet at 3:36, that's not a real pac-man, but a PC inside a pac-man shaped cabinet. Seriously if you are going to do historical videos like this you have to be right.
There is only 2 ghosts on the screen at a time for the 2600 version due to hardware limitations. They should have used bank switching to correct some of those issues. If they anticipated selling 20 million copies they could have afforded an additional 4K of rom.
@@SoulforSale There are 4 ghosts, you just can't see them because of the way the game was captured. The game has Pac-Man, and 4 ghosts, it just alternates between them.
@@SoulforSale Yes I know, what I am saying that in his footage it is only showing 2 because of how the gameplay was captured. It doesn't help that the video is encoded at 25fps. Look at this video at one minute in. Only 2 ghosts are visible, the other two are not seen in this capture.
I just remember having fun with it. We could see it didn't look as good as the arcade, but that was true of every Atari game. I never thought bad about it, and I'd never heard another kid ever complain about the differences. Expectations were not what they are today for such things. It was actually just really cool to be able to play video games at home at all.
I wasn't aware the Pac Man single existed until this video. I had to pause and go watch it, very 80s but also very fun. So thanks for shouting that out.
I remember playing this with the whole family. My dad got hooked to it. And yes we all knew that it wasn't faithful but we didn't care. And the same goes with my cousins that came to play. The idea of playing pacman at home was bonkers at the time. We cannot judge games like we do today. The landscapes were just different.
My friend had this on preorder…the day it came out his mom took us to Montgomery Wards and grabbed it, took it to his place and loaded it up. Was possibly the most disappointing day of my young life.
They still use the sound effects from this version of the game in sound clips used for actors playing much more modern consoles or handhelds in movies/TV. It's also worth noting that the Nintendo Gameboy had a ton of terrible games and ports (especially movie licensed games) but somehow kept chugging along fine.
The fact is that _back then,_ it was _impossible_ (because money don't grow on trees) to play video games _at home_ unless you either bought an _arcade_ version of a video game, or you bought a HOME video game system. The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is unquestionably inferior to the arcade version, but _back then,_ if you wanted to play it _at home, that's_ how you did that.
I was a big Donkey Kong fan, which is the reason I asked my folks for a Colecovision. I didn't find out until about ten years ago that it was a bootleg port. One thing we have to acknowledge, though, is that the 2600 Pac-Man sound effects are a Gen-X cultural meme.
@@turbomarioYeah, I had the Coleco that came with DK. But I could swear I heard on another home console docu that the port was unlicensed. Unfortunately, it has been far too long for me to remember exactly where I heard it.
I lived through this Atari era including a visit to the facility in El Paso, with my mom, on the 1st day of sales. I remember watching the game play thinking.....this sucks. 😂. Thanks for the video! So well done.
There's one other minor issue that all arcade -> home conversions had to deal with. Most arcade games use a "portrait" display where the display is taller than it is wide, while televisions are "landscape" - wider than they are tall. Particularly when considering the resolution limits and such to get a game like pacman on a regular television at the correct aspect ratio requires using only half the pixels on the screen. So it's never going to look exactly like the arcade game. The 2600 had the fabulous limitations that you mentioned. Keep in mind that Namco's arcade graphics processor (built from discrete components) was way ahead of its time in 1980. They had multi-colored sprites along with great color capabilities for the tiled background. The 2600 was produced in the mid 1970s and had a much tighter budget for the hardware and particularly the graphics. It effectively had the capability of two sprites, so the ghosts all had to use a single sprite and alternate between redraws. It didn't use a tiled background at all, so the CPU had to effectively draw every single scan line as the scan line was needed. This included sprite placement, by the way. There were around 75 clock cycles per scan line, so positioning sprites and drawing the background had to be accomplished in 20 or 30 CPU instructions per line. Meanwhile, more modern hardware had video hardware that automatically drew the screen after the CPU set it up one time, allowing the program to do other things. The 128 bytes of RAM didn't help, either. Pac-Man requires keeping track of the state of each dot, locations of player and ghosts, and scores. That much RAM is quickly consumed. Space Invaders is another game with outsized memory requirements for the 2600. The reality was that the 2600 was built at the very leading edge of an extremely fast technological growth period and within a couple of years of its release it was very outdated. The TI-99/4 came out a couple of years later and already had what would become the standard tiled background along with general-purpose sprites. Other machines of the time had much more advanced capabilities - the Apple computers, Commodore VIC-20 and later 64, Radio Shack Color Computer series, etc.. Those systems were priced far above the 2600, but within a few years the prices had dropped. There was also the intellivision which had tiled background plus 8 sprites in the late 1970s. The 2600 couldn't compete with any of that due to video hardware limitations.
Yep, the 2600 really only had one advantage by the early 1980's and that was the sheer number of them in existence. On no technical measure did it still stand up at hat point, but even well into the 1980's it was by far the most common system anyone actually owned.
I remember as a kid wanting a 2600 solely for Pacman. Pacman was everything then. But then I saw it up close and was stunned at how bad it was. That was the first of many arcade-to-console/computer ports that disappointed my younger self. I was amazed when they did get it right - like Ms. Pacman on the C64. Nice video!
I bought a 2600 late, very late in it's run. a 4 switch wood grain. It came bundles with a Pac-man cart and Combat. I barely played Pac-man. I played mostly Activation games, like River Raid. I still have it. I think I paid $99 CDN for it. It was a lot of casual work for a HS Student. I
The fact that an inexperienced programmer was able to build that within the 2600's ridiculous 128 byte RAM limitation is amazing in and of itself. I remember when this game came out... I saw it and immediately went WTF. I had a 2600 and I did NOT buy this game. Oh btw, THANK YOU for not using a lame AI-generated narration. You'll get a new subscriber because of that alone.
For me and my sister THIS is the version of Pac-Man. We played for interminable hours at home and the possibility to go to an arcade and compare games was small. This was the first game we had and it lives in a special place in my heart.
I was 8 years old in 1982 and I was thrilled to get Pacman on my Atari 2600! I certainly wasn't disappointed. I didn't even question the difference between the arcade version and the Atari 2600 version, for some reason.
I remember being SO EXCITED in 1982 when Pacman for the Atari 2600 was released. My parents took me to K-mart and there was a huge display for it with banners. It cost I think roughly $35 -- big money in those days. I eagerly took it home to play. I remember my little brother and I thinking 'What the heck?' once it loaded. Disappointing doesn't describe the feeling. It was like getting mugged. I never felt positive for the 2600 afterwards and soon switched to a Colecovision.
I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I got this game. Once I inserted into my VCS, all my excitement died. It was back to my local arcade for me to burn quarters!
Pack Man was the very first video game I played. I was 8 back in 1981. Our family went out to eat at Perkins, don't know if they're still around, but in the back by the jukebox were 2 video games. Galaga and Pac Man. So I ask my dad for some quarters. He gave me the 7 he had. He literally had to pull me away when our food came because I was in the middle of a game and I still had quarters left and I wanted to play video games than eat.
I played the Atari 5200 version first. I then got an Atari 65XE, with games on a floppy disk. Only then did I encounter the 2600 version, and it was so bad that I thought it was a bootleg. But apparently it was legit.
True story; my Mom was somehow gifted with the ability to absolutely dominate the 2600 version of Pacman. She was horrible at every other video game, including the official coin-op version of Pacman. But somehow, some way, she could play this 2600 version for hours without getting killed, even when the ghosts became insanely quick. The neighbor kids would even come over and watch in amazement. Unexplainable...
EDIT: My mother is now 75 and just underwent triple bypass surgery. I don't know how much longer she will be with me, but I had to show her this overwhelming response. Thank you to everyone.
My grandmother and mother would play Pac-Man against each other all the time (it was also the only video game they played). Apparently, after a certain score (5000?), the ghosts would start moving in a predictable pattern, so it was possible to play almost indefinitely. At that point the ghosts were moving so fast that there was very little room for error, and if you made a mistake it was very difficult to recover. If they played long enough, the game would malfunction and become unplayable (basically a kill screen). I don't know how they found the pattern, but once they did a single game could last hours.
I was the same way. This Pac-Man, myself and my dad could play for hours. But I also beat ET, Sword Quest (the first in the series) and went very far in Defender and I sucked at the arcade Pac-Man and Defender.
But the games were built differently for difficulty and the switches allowed for different options in game play.
Although I was not aware of it at the time and they almost always stayed on the normal settings for the switches. Also we had the station wagon wood grain and the black plastic version of the 2600, back in the day
@@hiroshimatwinkie5571they played the 2600 version or another? In the arcade, half the screen would glitch, due to a bug after so many points or levels reached. You could still play it, if you had memorized the maze. They even made a whole game with that purpose in mind.
@@tilasole3252 Oh, yeah "Defender"! that game was the SHIT! Tempest, BattleZone, Missile Command and Defender were my arcade "go to"s!
Same here. It was the only game she played, and she kept a notepad of all of our high scores. Hers was usually the highest.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I were fully aware the Atari 2600 versions of arcade games were way inferior to the arcade versions. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command. We expected no less for Pac-Man. But for some of us, we couldn't afford to keep putting quarters in machines. This is what we settled for
Yup....but even then, we knew the home version of Pac-Man was terrible. Atari game graphics we're always going to be a step down, but the gameplay was usually still quality. Pac-Man.... wasn't. Maze Craze was a hundred times better, and we quickly went back to that.
Yep even as a 9 year old I knew it was horrible, but we had it in our home to hold us over visiting the arcade.
It said it was $32.99. You could play 132 acarde games of pacman for what this POS cost.
Well said.
how many quarters did you drop at the local gaming center vs what you paid for the 2600 version?
We played it anyway. That's what gaming was back then. The 2600 was rough. But you played because that's what you had.
And we liked it! Don't get me wrong, some games were worse than others, and Pac-Man was a bit of a disappointment. But it must be remembered that until popular consoles like the 2600 arrived, TV was a completely passive medium. You sat, you watched whatever was on, all you could do was change the channel. But this new technology put the viewer in control of the action on the screen for the first time. It was thrilling, especially as a child. We didn't sit around pissed off that our videogames didn't look like Call of Duty because there was no Call of Duty. We marveled at the videogames we DID have, because they were state of the art.
@@dondrapersayswhat This is very true. It's also amazing to think that we put about as much time into the games as people put into call of duty these days
With prices now....I need a cheap crappy alternative again.
Lol.
Otherwise emulate old stuff.
I remember it got the point where I was playing for two or three hours, got to several hundred points and had to cut it off. There was no point to continuing. Sometimes when playing, I encountered a bug where Pacman would go through the tunnel, then float through the walls and ghostbox over and over.
As an eleven year old, I knew this was a shitty port of Pac-Man, but the fact that my friend and I could play this at his house meant we overlooked all the flaws. I can still hear the each of the sounds, and they ring with nostalgia.
I was nine and my friends dad was a manager at Kmart and brought it home for us to play.
I remember thinking, this doesn’t look right, why are the ghosts flickering?
Then I heard that Do DO DO Do sound when it started and I was like what is this?
I played it anyway.
I was 9 and didn't know I was supposed to hate it.
I think part of the reason you can still hear the sounds is that movies and TV shows _still_ use sound effects from the Atari 2600 versions of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong whenever they need to create an arcade din.
@@potato9832😂
That was the whole point of the 2600. You could play games at home for the first time, although the quality wasn't as high as the arcades. I remember the 5200 had a close to arcade quality about it, and then, of course, Nintendo's NES was the one that kind of achieved parity with arcades at the time.
The irony is, the sound effects of that and the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong are still used TODAY when someone's playing any random video game in a movie. So those of us who played it back then still get PTSD from hearing it in the movies.
BONK BONK BONK BONK
I still remember the disappointment of going to me cousin’s house to play this and we spent maybe 15 minutes with it before going straight to Combat. On a good note, it taught us to educate ourselves before buying ANYTHING.
To bad a lot of people are still not learning that with the modern video gaming industry
@@kerrychhim9983because we don’t use the internet correctly
I was 11. Just seeing the screen here made my left eye twitch.
Crushing Disappointment Achievement unlocked!
@@kerrychhim9983 Concord a modern big budget AAA blockbuster did worse than this port.
Similar story here! For me, it was around 1986, went to a kindergarten friend's house for a sleepover to play PacMan and I remember being so UTTERLY disappointed. This disappointment eventually fueled my skipping on asking for the Atari for Christmas a year later
(Went for the Nintendo)
When it came out, I bought this game for my 2600 unit and I really didn't mind the differences because I was able to play the game, such as it was, in my home. I saved money in the long run (after springing for the cost of the cartridge) because I didn't have to pump quarters into an arcade machine. It was a different version of the arcade game, but at the time I had fun with the Atari version of Pac-Man.
Yeah, this is roughly me too. I was old enough to have played the arcade version, but not a lot, and I had plenty of fun with the Atari version. The fact that it wasn't the arcade version was not that important to me. I'd say I got my money's worth.
Yeah, overall, I enjoyed it and embraced the differences. I think my high score was over 100k or so as young lad and I was pumped LOL
The Atari 800 version was pretty good.
"We have Pac-Man at home."
@@SayAhh and I clapped them cheeks lol
The later Ms. Pac Man port for 2600 was reportedly a fair bit improvement.
A huge improvement, yes. Still some flicker, but greatly reduced and it has 4 ghosts instead of only two, among other improvements. th-cam.com/video/CYjSI4Pnh7M/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VovbcVvZxtNed1cQ
Yes, it was! A vast improvement that was fun to play.
imagine if they had made pac man as good as ms pac man
No "reportedly" about it. It was really really good. And Jr. Pac-Man was even better.
@@MyWeirdRecordCollection The 2600's Jr. Pac-Man was, amazingly, developed by the same team who created the "Pac-Man ROM hack" which later became Ms. Pac-Man-widely considered the best Pac-Man game of the arcade era. Anyway those guys were brilliant, which explains why Jr. Pac-Man on 2600 was such a triumph of development.
Two things I and many other Atari fans wish people would STOP SAYING (and implying):
- Atari 2600 Pac-Man contributed to the video game crash of '83. NO, IT DID NOT. AT ALL. Neither did E.T.
- The "it was so bad that unsold copies were buried in Alamogordo." The Alamogordo landfill was a dumping ground for *all* of Atari's extra stock, not just Pac-Man. As the video correctly points out, there were plenty of instances of some of Atari's most popular titles there as well (including hardware).
Also, the Atari 2600 couldn't have won an award from Sears for 1976 because it didn't exist until 1977.
Now...I was seven years old when Pac-Man came out for the 2600, and I can tell ya....I was (and still am) a major Pac-Man fan, and I wasn't ignorant: I knew right away that the 2600 game looked nothing like the arcade version I was lucky to play only once a month, if that. But I also knew that the Atari 2600 was very limited and that programmers could only do so much. For Christmas 1982, my parents got my older brother and me the Atari 2600 (which shocked the HELL out of me because I didn't think my parents would ever allow video games in the house -- my brother had a pong console in the late '70s and they made him get rid of it!), and they also bought Pac-Man and put it in the box. I gotta tell ya: I played the HELL out of that version of Pac-Man. I knew full well that it wasn't the same: the colors were way off, the sound was weird, no cut scenes, only one bonus prize that never changed, no separate monst--uhh, ghost-- AI, etc. But I still played it for hours on end and loved it. Because if I wanted to play Pac-Man, that was my only choice, unless I wanted to wait for our monthly trips to the mall and I could play it at Aladdin's Castle.
Some tidbits:
- The "ghosts" in the 2600 version actually have *two* colors -- in fact, it's pretty clear in the video -- not one. It's just that 1) the colors are so close and 2) the flicker is so distracting that you can't really tell.
- The enemies were always called "monsters" in the arcade version. In fact, check the arcade bezels for not just Pac-Man but also Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, and Jr. Pac-Man -- they all say "monsters." (Even the original Japanese versions -- do a Japanese-to-English translation, and it comes up as "monsters.") The reason they're called "ghosts" on the Atari 2600 version is *because of* the flicker, making them kind of see-thru. (Kinda like how many Intellivision cartridge manuals disguised bugs in their games as surprise features; I forgot the exact wording they used.)
- Many have found that if you flip the TV Type switch on the console to B&W, it actually looks a LOT better! (I tend to agree.)
- Tod Frye said that the two things that really made the game so limited: 1) as the video says, the game being on an only 4k cart, and 2) that TPTB demanded that the game have two-player options. If just one of those two items had been conceded, we may have ended up with a much better game.
- The maze is basically rotated to fit the 4:3 aspect of a TV screen. When you think about it that way, it makes sense that 1) the tunnels are on the top and bottom instead of the sides, and 2) the ghosts exit their pen from the right instead of the top.
And this only occurred to me now. There's a conspiracy theory out there that Coleco made their Atari 2600 ports intentionally poor just to kind of lure people to their more arcade-accurate ColecoVision console and titles. Of course, the contractors who developed the games for Coleco vehemently deny that, and for many, many reasons I believe them. Now...the Pac-Man games for Atari's 8-bit computers and the 5200 were MUCH better and quite arcade-accurate. Why has there been no conspiracy theory that Atari intentionally made the 2600 Pac-Man bad in hopes to influence sales of their more expensive units??
Not that a corporate sabotage theory needs to be believable to exist, but intentionally making a crappy version of a beloved game for your company's best selling system would be suicide. Even if it made the 5200 look better by comparison, that makes it look like Atari is admitting their 2600 is shit. Atari was surprisingly generous with their software ports on other systems, as they should have been. Pac Man was pretty decent on Intellivision and I remember enjoying Centipede on Colecovision. This is wise as it portrayed Atari as a competent manufacturer of software, no matter the hardware. I think what helps promote the urban legend that Coleco intentionally made crappy software for other systems is that they never really made much good software for the competitors. Donkey Kong on the 2600 makes sense given the hardware and memory limitations, but the Donkey Kong on Intellivision just looked and played beyond atrocious. Atari 2600 Zaxon was awful, Moustrap was more underwhelming than Pac Man, and most Coleco software on the other systems barring Venture were lackluster (to my knowledge.) I doubt it was an intentional decision of sabotage, but it gave the impression Coleco didn't prioritize anything but Colecovision.
My younger brother and I had a 2600 early on in the late 70s, but when we'd argue over what to play, my parents put their foot down and said if it didn't stop, they'd sell it. And when we didn't stop, they did. In 1982 they got another one for us for Christmas after my brother and I grew up some more, along with 4 cartridges--Adventure, Space Invaders, Warlords, and Missile Command. The first two were ridiculously good classics, Warlords was great 1v1 off and on, and Missile Command was great at torturing our hands, because we could play it for hours before finally dying.
When Pac-Man came out, we were deeply disappointed. Not as disappointed as at Raiders of the Lost Ark or Sword Quest, but I digress.
Alladin's Castle....At what mall? Was it Woodmar? I think they had one.
"Atari 2600 Pac-Man contributed to the video game crash of '83. NO, IT DID NOT. AT ALL. Neither did E.T."
Based on what exactly? When your triple-A games are absolute garbage, it impacts your business.
@@doctorc-ton1099 Lincoln Mall in Matteson, IL.
Funny how the programmer and the others who raised the alarm are the only ones who are mentioned by name but the executives who are directly responsible for tanking the company remain safely incognito. I would also bet that they got nice cushy jobs after leaving Atari.
Standard corpo bullshit.
We need more name and shame of terrible executives, PMs, and mangers in general in tech history.
Those execs need their asses kicked.
As they say, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
My parents put this in my Easter basket when I was 10 or so. I didn’t care how it looked, I was playing PacMan at home. Thanks Mom and Dad! Good memories.
This is actually the reaction of most people who don't have 40 years of hindsight to look through. I knew it looked bad at the time, but my friends and I still played it and had fun!
@@chrischarla424 yeah more people need to just enjoy things nowadays. You can play all of these online for free now, now that’s a miracle!
Thanks for not blaming Tod Frye, he is a competent programmer and he did the best he could do with such limited resources. If only they allowed him to use a 8K cartridge the game would have been much better, as Ms. Pac-Man demonstrated.
Well put.
I came here to write basically the same.
@@jimboAndersenReviews Frye was also working on a routine aimed to reduce the flickering of the ghosts. He was almost done with it, he only needed a few more days, but Atari executives were inflexible.
I remember seeing Ms.PacMan for the 2600 later and thinking, "this is what Pac Man should have been." Apparently they did learn their lesson.
@@grandetaco4416 Atari did actually outsource Ms. Pac-Man to an external team of developers, General Computer Corporation. Incidentally, the same company had previously worked on the arcade version, no wonder they knew what they were doing.
There were still tons of other limits in the hardware even 8k could not fix, the hardware by then was outdated and showed its age, Pacman was the first popular game not portable anymore more or less. It is a wonder that they were able to pull off a decent Space Invaders port that kept the console alive longer than it should have. If they 5200 would have been in place in 82 like planned originally Pacman would have been a home run and a system seller. The atari 8 bit home computer port of the game was one of the best if not the best port of the game to any system of that year!
This game was responsible for the day where I was the coolest kid in 3rd grade. This game was *impossible* to find when it first came out. My mom and I happened to be at Lionel Playworld one day after school and a guy was stocking the shelves with Pac Man cartridges. Mom was super frugal, but she knew how big a deal this was and bought it for me. I invited a few friends over to play it, and they called their friends, and pretty soon the whole neighborhood knew I had the only copy of PacMan anyone had seen. There must have been 30 kids at my house that afternoon, including a bunch of people I didn't even know.
Sweet!
This version was NOT a disappointment to me. My family was poor and was able to buy us this and I could play this all day for FREE
most intelligent comment on youtube. Same here my friend.
We couldn’t even afford to buy a console game. I had to go to a friend’s house to play one.
I would have been happy just to have this version in our home. We couldn't afford gaming consoles. My first console wasn't until the Nintendo NES. I was a junior in college in 1992 when a roommate couldn't afford rent and he traded me it and about 30 games for one month rent. He moved out the next month.
Our 2600 was a hand me down and came with a few games including pac man, this was probably around early to mid 80's. This thing was a big part of our childhood, me and my cousins would play for hours.
Poverty builds resilience. Don't be bitter about it. I'm an engineer, what we are working on is to make everything available for everybody. We will reduce the cost of EVERY luxury to nothing in time. You can play the arcade original today with the MAME simulator, if you care to. Whatever device you are using this to read on is capable of doing this simulation.
I remember seeing the 2600 version on display at Montgomery Ward. My mom and I were walking through the store and I saw that the store had it set up to play. I remember asking the salesman what it was. He said that it was Pac Man. I said, no it wasn't. There was a Pac Man cabinet outside of the store (the store was attached to a mall and you couldn't walk too far without being able to play one of those machines. They were EVERYWHERE. I told the man that Pac Man was out in the hallway and that the game on the Atari wasn't Pac Man. I was 6 at the time and was not fooled.
False Story.
@@Lou-yf1jowhy do you say it's false? There's nothing fantastical about this story, like at all. I don't get it.
@@Lou-yf1jo- I'm a few years older, so I was around at the time and had the game, and the story is entirely plausible -- Pac Man for the 2600 was trash. I played it 3 or 4 times and threw the cartridge in a box in the back of my closet.
@@cacogenicistI agree, it was terrible.
@@Froggievilleus Montgomery Ward…lol. Fellow old fart I see.
As a kid who played Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, it seemed pretty great at the time. MUCH closer than say the "port" of Zaxxon, which was not even recognizable as the same game.
I knew 2600 Pac-Man was terrible but 10 year old me still played it all the time.
Same here. We made due with what we had and we learned to enjoy what we were given by our parents.
The Atari version of Pac-Man was the epitome of "We have a ___ at home."
Right up there with "We have Star Wars at home."
I grew up in this era and my experience was different. We didnt really care aboit the differences, we were just stoked we could play video games at home. We even played the hell out of game abominations like ET and Pitfall ... In those times, graphics and background colors didn't matter to us, but then again we were just kids
Is Pitfall considered a game abomination? Really? That was the one game I absolutely LOVED on my best friend's Atari
😂
@@AnHebrewChild I loved it so much also 😄
Jack Black was in the Pitfall commercial. The game frustrated me, but E.T. frustrated me even more.
pitfall compared to E.T. is night and day
Pitfall is a fucking classic, there is nothing wrong with pitfall.
I was born in 1975 and a kid who had Pac-Man, ET, and a bunch of other games for the Atari 2600. I thought it was great and didn't know about the negative reviews or that the game could have better. I knew the arcade version was better, but having it at home and not needing to put quarters in to play was great. I loved it at the time.
Ok I see it now, its weird and newer versions blow it away. But in 82 I was just excited to have pacman at home and didnt notice all the flaws.
How could you not notice how different it was? I was 12 in ‘82 and knew that this game was barely a shadow of the arcade version. That being said, I already knew that the 2600 wasn’t capable of full arcade emulation and accepted the poor quality as a necessary tradeoff for getting to play it at home.
If you were a kid in the 80's this was as good as it gets without having to pump quarters at the arcade.
I listened to an interview with Tod Frye, and he shared a lot of what you mentioned here... lack of rom space, rushed development, blue background. It was also clear that he didn't have a lot a familiarity with the source material. He mentioned that the tunnels were placed at the top and bottom rather than the sides because it was much easier to program, and he thought it was "good enough". Fortunately we ended up with Ms Pac-Man awhile later, and it was a much much better game than this one.
Namco added the top and bottom tunnels in recent iterations of the franchise - possibly as a nod to the 2600 version. Soak in that for a bit lol.
Ironically, the tunnels are in the same place they are in the arcade game (in the middle of the "long sides" of the screen) ... they just turned the REST of the stuff, probably because they figured they'd have parents screaming at them if their kids started turning the family TV on its side.
The Atari version was actually the first version I was ever exposed to as a kid.
When I was young in the 80's I thought that the other Pac Man games were just improved versions as I actually thought that ATARI 2600 was the original.
Same, I had fun with it *shrug*
Same here, I don't think I played the original until at least three or four years after I'd played the 2600 version to death.
This is a good and informative video, but the main point can be made very quickly: Atari rightly assumed that Pac-Man would sell millions of copies just because it was Pac-Man, and regardless of quality. That’s why the company didn’t bother sinking the right resources into it. It’s a lesson in corporate greed.
And not the only one from Atari. They did the same thing with E.T. I've never been to business school but if Atari isn't taught as a cautionary tale there, I'd be shocked.
The whole "Atari Pacman and ET helped crash the industry" bit is overblown. I got both those games in 82.. with my Atari...we played em a lot. Never complained. Still love both of em, and still enjoy playing em. 1982 was 5 years into the 2600 VCS life... by 83, the system was old news. 83 was also the year of the Cabbage Patch kid.. Atari was not a hit toy anymore... Also, the arcade crash in 83-84 was not due to Atari..again, it was seen as a fad thar had run out of steam. Space Invaders, Pac Man.. all those golden age games were already in the rear view mirror. PacMan Fever had cooled off. Also, the glut of cheap unlicened shovelware that flooded stores after the Activision lawsuit probably did alot more to erode the confidence in the Atari than Pacman and ET.
That seems to make more sense, the big hit console videogame was no longer popular, but companies kept pumping games for it, bad ones too, to make quick buck, so they lost money badly on it, and burned consumers. Feels less the fault of a couple of games and just... the way some fads go.
At age 12 I was at a launch promotion at a children's museum and I was allowed to play it once in a high score competition. I thought it was poor quality. I was raised to be critical of hype and this reinforced that. I came home with some promotional items from it that I kept for years but don't think I have anymore.
There were some decent arcade/2600 ports. Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missile Command were good. Defender was quirky but playable, and Berzerk and Wizard of Wor were fun. Ms.Pac Man was surprisingly good. The Atari Pac-Man, well, it was, as mentioned, fun to be able to play Pac Man at home but it was certainly not very good. Generally as Arcade games became more sophisticated, the 2600 ports became less and less able to emulate them satisfactorily.
I still vividly remember the shit-eating grin on my little brother's face when he came home with my mom from the store the day she bought the game. We played that thing for days, years. We watched the cartoon. It wasn't until the rise of TH-cam that I learned how disappointed I and everyone else supposedly was by the 2600 version.
I was old enough to love Pac Man when it came out in the arcade, but not old enough to understand why the 2600 version wasn't a faithful replica when games like Asteroids were reasonably close. I was heartbroken at the 2600 version. It was such a letdown. It neither looked, sounded nor played like the arcade.
It was my awakening that "games aren't like the cover art, nor are they like the Arcade"...But to be fair I was pretty young so I just grabbed the sloppy joystick and rolled with it...Great times.. occasionally you'd go to your mates who had a Vectrex or Oddysey and be blown away...
I worked with Todd (years later), super good dude. He did better than anyone else could have at the time. And you just need to check out Ms. Pac-Man for the 2600 to see what "could have been" with a bigger ROM -- it was pretty nice.
I loved Pac-Man 2600 growing up! Still play it to this day. I mean what did people expect? That the 2600 would exactly reproduce the arcade graphics? That was naive thinking during the 80s. They shouldn't have complained about the 5200 either 😍
More than 40 years later, I can honestly remember being very disappointed with how awful the Pac-Man game looked for Atari 2600.
Me and my friends thought it was a joke, or at best a temporary product to tame the masses until a better version came out. We were so disappointed.
i remember owning pac-man for the atari2600 as a kid in the 80's. i didn't care if was best port of pac-man. i played it a lot over the years until i got the nes. i do remember that one of my brother's friends show us that there was a glitch in the game where you go up & down on the screen. over the years i forgot how to do it
so you spent long nights in your room playing with your joy stick
Not just alone. Often with brother and his brother's friends, while everyone else watched.
This game shows that development crunch, rushed games, and out-of-touch and greedy publishers with short-term thinking is not a new thing in the video game industry. They've been there since almost the start.
And thinking like that didn't just happen right before a crash. Publishers have been like this after Nintendo resurrected the console business up to this very day, all those 40 years!
Greed is part of human nature for many and has been around as long as humanity.
Despite most of the games being objectively bad, a lot of people still have nostalgia for the 2600. I have a disk of old Atari games for my Xbox that I play from time to time.
This game had nothing to do with the crash of Atari and the video game industry. The 2600 version of Pac Man was well received and a great version for the home console. The 2600 console which sold with this game includd sold out at every distributor. Although the 'crash' was ultimately blamed on the release of E.T. - and justly so (thanks Spielberg); the true crash of the industry was Atari licensing rights to far too many companies who flooded the market with crap. In retrospect; Apple Computer (in the day) demanding anything licensed to their computer platform (all software) would carry the badge of Apple approval and guarantee the quality and compatibility of software. Although this imperialistic method was frowned upon in the day; ultimately, it kept Apple Computer alive and customers happy with compatibility guaranteed as the operating systems evolved. Too many TH-camrs are making 'history of video game and computer' videos having never experienced it first hand, and simply regurgitating nonsense read on wikipedia.
This is true. Im 57 and remember it all too well. For its time it was awesome to have. Like Asteroids and Space Invaders for 2600...
2600 was my first experience with pac man at 4 years old. I didn't get the hype until way later.
I don't understand how they banked everything on 1 programmer doing a rush-job...
Atari wasn't exactly smart then....
And the E.T. programmer of all people...
Back then it was standard operating procedure for games to be made by a single programmer. In fact it probably would have been difficult to add more, given that on the 2600 they were written in Assembly.
@@JamesChatting It wasn't the E.T. programmer. Howard Warshaw did E.T. in five weeks, when most games at that time took 3-6 months. When given enough time he wrote some classic games.
@@arlasoftHoward Warshaw and the E.T. Atari game documentary was sad to watch. Impossible task. Spielberg signed off on it too…
That's why I love playing the arcade Coin-Op version. I miss playing River Raid for the Atari 2600. I got up to 10,xxx points and took a polaroid picture of the screen, sent in the pic, and got my patch. Lost my patch some years later. Might have looked cool on a baseball cap, tho.
I remember when Ms. Pac Man came out on 2600 and I was pleasantly surprised how much better it was than Pac Man. Back in the day, you had to have the expectation that Atari 2600 games came no where close to the arcade. I believe arcade like expectations increased when Colecovision entered the picture.
Honestly, well into the 90s we all knew we were getting an inferior product, even masterful ports like the SNES version of the SF2 games were clearly compromises. Other than the Neo Geo, of course, AFAIC, the first time a home console managed to consistently provide ports that legitimately matched the arcade was the Dreamcast, which managed to more or less carbon copy a slew of NAOMI games (and Sammy's Atomiswave cabinets were essentially modified DCs, which made them extremely easy to port as well); tragically, arcades themselves were essentially dead within three years of its launch, so we barely even had a chance to fully enjoy the development. I miss almost everything about that time.
4:02 The dots being the same color as the wall was not "to save memory." Both elements were rendered with the 2600's "background layer", as this is the only _reasonable_ way on the 2600 to render several dozen individual small elements (the dots). You can only assign one color for this layer, though 2600 software engineers quickly figured out that you could change values like those on a per-scanline (or sometimes faster) basis. When it comes to the background layer, effectively the best you can get is a new color per scanline. There is a video of an electronics convention where Tod Frye sees this technique in action in the homebrew "Pac-Man 8K" and laments that he wasn't able to figure out that trick in time for his version. That's the reason why his Pac-Man, and every contemporaneous Pac-Man clone on the VCS that also used the background layer, have the dots and maze the same color. This was not dictated by memory constraints. It was simply not in the bag of tricks in 1982 or indeed arguably before the homebrew scene.
4:08 The ghosts _are_ actually different colors, but unfortunately most of the chosen colors are only _slightly_ different from one another, and they certainly aren't a match for the arcade. I assume the colors were chosen so that they would stand out well against the blue background, especially on old early 80s TVs displaying an RF signal. The footage of the 2600 Pac-Man you have provided does an unavoidably poor job of representing even the already miserable output the game manages, as your video is 24fps and this is thoroughly incompatible with the 60Hz of the 2600's output. (And you seem to have started with 30fps footage in the first place, which discarded every other frame of video.) That said, you can still very plainly see in your footage that one of the visible ghosts is light green and the other is light orange.
As for the overall jank of the game, let me be blunt: Todd Frye was perpetually high, and also a bit of a mental case, as revealed in the documentary _Once Upon Atari._ I feel comfortable attributing most of the bizarre design choices to that. The hopeless repetitiveness of the maze, the complete disregard of the arcade game's sound design, the fact that Pac-Man now has an eye and-somehow-an underbite, and particularly, the fact that what used to be a memorable opening tune has transformed into a quick blip of "music" which, despite lasting only four notes, somehow manages to evoke Schoenberg in its utter discordance. Seriously, how do we go from the classic Pac-Man jingle to what may casually be described as a cat walking across a dialup phone's keypad? The answer is drugs.
they (ATARI) couldn't even make dots.... they were fuggin rectangle squares like ziti pasta. the fruit replaced by a big square. the one portal at top/bottom. and the sounds were awful and headache inducing, with Pac-Man mouth stuck in one direction, to the left at all times.
game was a failure. 3/10
@@crokkadoodledoo9956 Indeed. As I said before, the dots more or less _had_ to be rendered by the 2600's "background layer." This is a feature of the hardware intended to display simple things like lines in _Pong (Video Olympics) or barriers in _Tank (Combat)._ The resolution of this layer is extremely low: One fourth of the console's total horizontal resolution, which explains why you can only get "wafer" shaped dots. There's no good explanation for why the fruit is now what the manual describes as a "vitamin," other than that there probably wasn't enough ROM to store almost ten different fruit spites and Tod may have felt that having a single, generic object was an acceptable compromise.
There actually is a 2600 game which attempted to use sprites to render proper dots _(Alien,_ which they made into a _Pac-Man_ clone). To achieve this, they had to stagger the vertical positions of the dots, so ultimately they don't line up in straight rows like you'd expect. It's... an interesting proof of concept. Ironically, I could make the case for _Alien_ being the best attempt at a _Pac-Man_ like game that the 2600 saw before the homebrew scene.
@@crokkadoodledoo9956 IIRC the Pac-Man instruction booklet described the dots as "wafers".
Kept me entertained for a couple hundred hours back in the day.
Many of us just accepted that there were a lot of restrictions to the 2600 console. It isn't as if there were a ton of high quality graphic titles for the machine. So that was basically as good as it was gonna get. Pitfall might have been the top of what it could do. So people expected more than it could possibly ever produce.
There is a homebrew 8k rom version for the 2600 that is much closer to the arcade version that proves the hardware was much more capable. So many fond memories of the 80's but we all tend to forget the extreme greed of the era.
th-cam.com/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/w-d-xo.html
The two video games I know with the most versions are Pac-Man and Tetris. I have played literally _dozens_ of each, just in the DOS era! For Pac-Man there were ASCII-art versions, versions made in QBASIC, monochrome versions, CGA versions, VGA versions. Versions with completely new gameplay mechanics and rules, and ones that were very faithful to the arcade original. I think I even played one that supported local multiplayer.
I think Tetris and Pac-Man are probably the most common games that people would pick to try their hand at programming.
I remember my friend had Pac Man on the Atari. Even as a 7 year-old, I wondered " Why does this look so bad??"
I'll never forget the hype for Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 when I was 7 years old. even my old neighbors bought the console after hearing that Pac-Man was coming out. The very next day they put the system and their 3 games in a box and threw it in their basement. Even at 7 years, I understood the disappointment.
I'd blame this quick and loose port of a hugely popular arcade game for the crash before anything else, including E.T. and I had E.T. and I played it 3x more than that horrendous Pac-Man port. A very decent Ms. Pac-Man port came out when it was already too late.
I remember the first time I've ever played an Atari 2600 and this version of Pac Man was the first version I've ever played. It was fine for what it was and I remember it for being the first video game I've ever played. Amongst the games I remember playing on the Atari 2600 when I was a young kid were Asteroids, The Empire Strikes Back and Berserk.
People who think that the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man was a disaster should play the Tomy handheld Pac-Man game. It's so bad that it makes the 2600 Pac-Man look good. I have played a few handheld versions of Pac-Man but the Tomy version is the worst. It cost about fifty dollars but wasn't worth fifty cents. At least the 2600 Pac-Man was free. It cost nothing. People did have to pay for it at first but Atari started including it for free with the Atari 2600 console. The Atari 2600 Pac-Man wasn't great but the Atari 5200 Pac-Man was awesome. It was almost as good as the arcade Pac-Man.
I was over at a friend's house and he had just gotten Pac Man. I was so disappointed. It just looked like hell compared to the rest of the ports.
I'll never forget the profound let-down I experienced when I got this version on my Atari after spending months glued to the arcade version. I just couldn't believe it.
As a 3 year old I loved playing it and had no idea it was a bad port until seeing other versions later... Maybe that was the target audience in reality😅
I have fond memories of the Atari PacMan. We got a free copy with the purchase of the 2600 system, but since it was through a coupon we had to wait. Some months later I picked up the morning mail from the side of the house, completely oblivious to the small Atari cartridge-sized bubble envelope in that day's drop as I went back to playing the games we already had. When my mom finally opened the package to reveal our treasure, we went right to it. Disappointing sound and graphics, for sure. And PacMan's mouth didn't even go up or down. But I did end up playing it so much I figured out a pattern when the game speed was at its max where I couldn't lose. Never wrote it down, so it's now lost to time.
Pacman was indeed subpar, but it wasn't horrible. Ms Pacman was a big improvement, and Jr Pacman was even better.
I had just started high school when PacMan for the 2600 arrived. My memory of PacMan for the Atari 2600 was that it accentuated how far apart arcade tech from home console tech had become. Games like Space Invaders and Berzerk ported over very well, but PacMan was clearly a more graphically-advanced game that was, it seemed, too much for our aging 2600s. It made our home console appear obsolete and more difficult to return to after playing the arcades, which now had even more advanced titles like Popeye, Pole Position, and Galaga. Where Adventure's primitive graphics were actually part of its charm, it just made our favorite muncher look bad.
Adventure was my favorite game on the Atari 2600. It's the only game I ever had where I discovered the easter egg embedded within. If you put enough items in one of the screens, you could go through the wall and find a message that stated who the game was created by. I'm 57 now and still have that cartridge as a decoration in my gaming room. It's the only relic I kept from my Atari 2600 days.
12:02 That's the homebrew version of _Donkey Kong_ for the VCS and it is excellent.
Anyway, the average development time for an Atari 2600 game was 3 to 6 months, so Todd Frye's work on _Pac-Man_ was not necessarily rushed.* What surprises me is that Atari didn't seem to put too much importance on getting the best programmer for such a popular arcade title. In fact, Todd and his team partner Bob Polaro (they shared office space) were allowed to choose who got _Pac-Man_ and who got _Defender._ Todd let Bob choose and Bob took _Defender_ because he didn't see how Todd could make _Pac-Man_ work on the system. Todd says that he was actually working on a "variable flicker" system that would have been one of the very first of its kind for the system and would have dramatically reduced flicker. But, he was sort of on probation at the company at the time and needed to get the game out so he abandoned the idea.
The homebrew version of _Pac-Man_ for the 2600 is called _Pac-Man 8K_ and it uses variable flicker (and is amazing). Here's a much older Todd Frye admiring it: th-cam.com/video/RqezF_Lv05Y/w-d-xo.htmlsi=1gFtpE41XBi8iVX9 It's fantastic but it's worth keeping mind that homebrew authors can take as long as they want to develop their games to perfect them, unlike those who worked back in the day.
* I'll tell you what was rushed: Howard Scott Warshaw's _E.T._ was given 5 WEEKS to finish in order to be ready for the holiday rush. The fact he was able to complete anything playable is amazing.
You're implying that ET was playable. It wasn't. It was a hot mess and it was darned near impossible for me as a kid to figure it out. All I did was run around til I got bored.
@@michaelmeyer2725 It's not a great game, but there are walk-thrus* here on TH-cam that show how to complete it. Just saying that for a game that was developed in only 5 weeks (a fraction of the average development time) it is impressive. The main frustration with the game is falling in those %$^#%&# pits! But once you learn the proper way to get out without immediately falling back in, it's not too bad.
* Such as this one: th-cam.com/video/QmrQkQsM9FU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=NcMvs0KrMjzaAlvt
The people running Atari after Bushnell sold it to Warner Communications were not from the entertainment business. (Bushnell got very frustrated with his new corporate masters and left after signing a non-compete agreement.) The man installed as CEO, Ray Kassar, had made most of his career in textiles and notoriously regarded the programmers as no better than 'towel designers'. Despite very good salaries and royalties, this disdain is what drove away some of Atari's best talent to start their own companies, Activision and Imagic. (Ron Fulop, the initial core talent at Imagic, had invented the bankswitching technique that enable greater than 4K cartridges to be used on the 2600.) Atari had no provision in their platform design for controlling and profiting from third party publishers. At best, good games from the new publishers made the platform more popular but that wasn't much help compared to the competition for gaming sales and the loss of talent. Parker Bros. having a huge hit with Frogger on the 2600 raised the profile of the machine but the money went to Parker Bros. and Sega.
@@epobirs It's kind of a bummer that bank switching even had to be used. The 6507 can natively address 8K, but they used a cartridge interface that had one less address line, meaning 4K was the new max. Good thing this was figured out, though. The fairly recent game "Circus Convoy" is actually a 32K game. Anyway, the limited hardware actually allowed for extreme flexibility which is one reason it lasted so long.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Similarly, the Atari 800 version of Mario Brothers, while quite good, was never released under Warner because it needed a 20KB ROM and they were not willing to do that added cost at the time. It was eventually released on the XEGS console descendant of the Atari 8-bit computers. It was better than the 7800 version despite the advantage on the 7800 side. Another case of talent making the difference, I suppose.
AFAIK, the first game cartridge that made use of bank switching on the Atari computers (and the 5200) was Bounty Bob Strikes Back, the sequel to Miner 2049'er. It was a 40KB game but playable on an 8K RAM system.
I wasn't old enough to know how it was judged by critics I just loved the game. I have spent more time with the 2600 version than any other version. In fact I still emulate it more than any other version. Those horrible colors, square pucks, flickering ghosts, they just bring back good memories.
getting a job at a top tier IT company was way different back then.
5:31 Now THAT is cool!! I was born too late to see something like this. As a '95-er, this tickles my inner arcade nerd.
For all the flak ET gets on the 2600 it's still one of my fondest memories of the 2600. It was a rather large and complicated game for it's time. You knew if it was a nurse or a guy in a suit that was chasing you or the kid when he came to rescue you. You knew you were hiding in a house/building. You went around purposely looking for parts to fix your ship. I beat it a couple of times.
Hi fellow ET enjoyer! I beat ET a bunch too, that game gave me a perspective and appreciation for open world exploration that I still enjoy in games now
@@eldrichnemo9312 I didn't think about that, but I think so too, on the appreciation of big open worlds.
@@eldrichnemo9312 what other games did you enjoy on the 2600?
@@tilasole3252 I was real little but I mainly remember Super Breakout and Berzerk
@@eldrichnemo9312 I like Arkanoid and similar games where you break the walls and get power ups. And I absolutely loved Berzerk. Although the cover art vs the game felt really off. However a lot of games did that
While Pac-Man for Atari takes a lot of shit these days rightfully so it is a bad port. It’s sold well and for the time for an arcade port to a home console it really didn’t disappoint. Nobody thought they were going to get the arcade game when they plugged Pac-Man Into their system. Everybody who owned it was just happy to have Pac-Man at their house.
You show the incorrect game in the thumbnail.
Seriously. It was so annoying, I had to click on the video simply to verify this wasn't a joke, and when it wasn't, downvote the video.
Wrong thumbnail. Good audio narration. Subscription withheld !
Munch-Man on the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was my childhood!
I worked for a CEO in 2001 at a company that WASN'T Atari. This CEO worked at Atari at the time Pac-Man was made. He said that (paraphrasing here) Namco was jerking them around on licensing the game to them. They had some deadline that they had to meet for the game to ship in some crucial window for sales. That date would fall on a Monday. Namco approved the license on the FRIDAY before that date, and the programmer wrote the game over the weekend. You might think that this CEO was just making up stories, but I also asked him "Are there really E T carts in a landfill?" And he confirmed that there ABSOLUTELY were, as he was there when it happened. Keep in mind this is 2001, back when this story was just urban legend, but it then turned out to be true.
Todd Fry did NOT write it in a weekend, which would have been flat out impossible. He wrote it in 6 months based on everything I ever heard. CEO sounds like he was out of touch with what was going on in development.
@@sa3270and the Atari 2600 was not really able to do better graphically. People go on about how ms pacman and pacman jr are so much better. They might play better, but they look terrible too
ET Landfill thing was never a legend the whole thing was major news at the time it happen and was in all the tv news channels and news papers at the time and hell Nolan even said so in every major interview he was in that ask him that question it's just idiots where just lazy and failed to look it up
@@phill6859 Compared to the arcades. Compared to the 2600 Pac-man, they're far more attractive games.
I had the Atari 2600 and Pac-man. I still have the stuff in a box somewhere. I don’t remember having a problem with it at the time. I guess I thought it was the best they could do with the technology at the time. I had Ms.Pac-man. The good old days.
When people talk about the Video Game Crash of '83, they always simplify it to Atari ET and Atari Pacman when really it was for multiple reasons and not because of two shitty games.
Home computers were beginning to come on to the market at that time. I'd imagine that they would've been the bigger killer.
Consoles were only good for playing games, but a computer could do more. If I were around then I'd probably be more interested in buying a computer even if a computer was more expensive since it would have been more useful than a console.
@@twistedyogert Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Home computers were another factor in the Video Game Crash of ‘83. This was why when the NES came out in America, it was marketed more as a toy than a video game console. In Internet Historian’s video on R.O.B., he talked about a prototype for the NES that was presented at a video game convention where it looked more like a personal computer, but when they figured out that it was a video game console, they lost interest and didn’t want it to be sold so Nintendo had to go back to the drawing board to think of different ways to appeal to Americans.
Honestly it was pretty simple. It was because of hundreds of shitty games.
The 2600 was packed full of shovelware that could be amusing for a playtime of maybe five minutes... My definition of a good 2600 game was a game that could be called a game. Montezuma's Revenge, Enduro, Pressure Cooker.... ET of all things is actually one of the best games on the system, but only after you know how the hell to play the thing. It's incomprehensible garbo otherwise. (Seriously, it's a really nice little scavenger hunt game that feels a like it has some variety from it randomized nature. I think the scavenger hunt genre was massively under used on the console.)
The Famicom and SG-1000 came out that year, and showed that video games didn't have to suck. That they could have more than one screen. That they could have colors and actual ART.
Atari failed because the suits didn't care about games. If the 5200 was actually good and they cared about creating value for themselves by establishing franchises, they could have continued to be somebody.
It's a shame, considering their arcade division was really pretty neat. How does a company like that produce Gauntlet. The divisions really were like two completely separate organizations...
The C64 and Apple 2e killed the first generation of consoles. Nintendo and Sega brought consoles back. Since then it's been a constant with PC and console gaming.
@@rikk319 The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This has been lingering on my mind ever since I was a kid. 2600 pacman looked so differently than arcade version and it really bothered me for the past 40 years. Now, I am glad to hear the full story. Thanks for this video.
Ive seen some sick PacMan homebrews for the 2600 using the original chipset. It was possible. The excuses are benign.
The key word there is homebrew. You can make a change in code and see the result 10 milliseconds later, you have all the information you could possibly want on the internet about how the system works and all the programming techniques used in the last 45 years. You work in a modern IDE with copy/paste/undo, multiple source files with comments and long, descriptive label and function names. You have all the time in the world with no pressure from a boss.
The guys working back then would have to wait half an hour for the code to assemble, then wait for someone to burn a ROM to find out if the change they made worked, while figuring out on the fly how to make 1977 home hardware do what cutting edge arcade hardware was only able to do by 1980/81.
With all that said Tod Frye didn't do himself any favours - he didn't push himself because he didn't really seem to like the game. It was just a job, and like any profession there will be those who do 'just enough' and those who go above and beyond. I'm sure if he cared enough he could at the very least have convinced them it should have a black background, but he didn't.
@@arlasoft They gave him restraints that foiled this version. Not just the black background but the time and memory limitations. It wasn't entirely the programers fault
Disastrous? Laughable. We as kids in the 80s enjoyed Pacman, E.T. and Space Invaders alike, MASSIVELY. true, the sprites flicker on Pacman, but other than that, it's a fine game.
The reason for the name change, from Puck-Man to Pac-Man, was due to their knowledge that idiots would change the Letter "P" in Puck to the 6th letter of the alphabet. Thus, we have Pac-Man in the U.S.
wow some one watch the shitty Scot Pilgrim movie
@@jsmith3946 Actually, I am 49 years old, and grew up in that era. Therefore, I possess quite the knowledge for video game history and trivia. Furthermore, when you know the true story how one man saved Nintendo from losing their beloved gorilla via a lawsuit, let me know.
It's not that bad of a game. Looks aren't everything. The thing did everything the arcade version did minus fruit progression and cut scenes.
I remember doing chores for $1, then running down to to PW Super market to get 4 plays of PacMan in the early 80’s. I had an atari 2600 and was so disappointed with their version of PacMan
I don't know where you got that date of 1979 of Pac-Man in Japan, it was released in 1980 in Japan. Also, your video footage of the 2600 version of the game has a frameskip happening or the interlaced capture is just dropping every other frame so you only see 2 ghosts on screen in your video. Lastly, what's with the homemade MAME cabinet at 3:36, that's not a real pac-man, but a PC inside a pac-man shaped cabinet. Seriously if you are going to do historical videos like this you have to be right.
There is only 2 ghosts on the screen at a time for the 2600 version due to hardware limitations. They should have used bank switching to correct some of those issues. If they anticipated selling 20 million copies they could have afforded an additional 4K of rom.
@@SoulforSale There are 4 ghosts, you just can't see them because of the way the game was captured. The game has Pac-Man, and 4 ghosts, it just alternates between them.
@@tigheklory they change with each frame. your brain just doesn't catch it
@@SoulforSale Yes I know, what I am saying that in his footage it is only showing 2 because of how the gameplay was captured. It doesn't help that the video is encoded at 25fps. Look at this video at one minute in. Only 2 ghosts are visible, the other two are not seen in this capture.
@@tigheklory oh ok I guess I thought you were talking about the flicker
I just remember having fun with it. We could see it didn't look as good as the arcade, but that was true of every Atari game. I never thought bad about it, and I'd never heard another kid ever complain about the differences. Expectations were not what they are today for such things. It was actually just really cool to be able to play video games at home at all.
I wasn't aware the Pac Man single existed until this video. I had to pause and go watch it, very 80s but also very fun. So thanks for shouting that out.
I remember playing this with the whole family. My dad got hooked to it. And yes we all knew that it wasn't faithful but we didn't care. And the same goes with my cousins that came to play. The idea of playing pacman at home was bonkers at the time. We cannot judge games like we do today. The landscapes were just different.
My friend had this on preorder…the day it came out his mom took us to Montgomery Wards and grabbed it, took it to his place and loaded it up. Was possibly the most disappointing day of my young life.
Nice job the research and production of this video. Thanks.
Still have my original Pac Man 2600 cartridge from when I was a kid. ET, too.
They still use the sound effects from this version of the game in sound clips used for actors playing much more modern consoles or handhelds in movies/TV. It's also worth noting that the Nintendo Gameboy had a ton of terrible games and ports (especially movie licensed games) but somehow kept chugging along fine.
The fact is that _back then,_ it was _impossible_ (because money don't grow on trees) to play video games _at home_ unless you either bought an _arcade_ version of a video game, or you bought a HOME video game system. The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is unquestionably inferior to the arcade version, but _back then,_ if you wanted to play it _at home, that's_ how you did that.
As a 5-6 year old kid I had no idea the Atari port was considered bad. I had tons of fun playing it
I was a big Donkey Kong fan, which is the reason I asked my folks for a Colecovision. I didn't find out until about ten years ago that it was a bootleg port.
One thing we have to acknowledge, though, is that the 2600 Pac-Man sound effects are a Gen-X cultural meme.
The Coleco version of Donkey Kong wasn’t a bootleg? It was licensed to Coleco by Nintendo of America and was literally the pack in title too
@@turbomarioYeah, I had the Coleco that came with DK. But I could swear I heard on another home console docu that the port was unlicensed. Unfortunately, it has been far too long for me to remember exactly where I heard it.
I lived through this Atari era including a visit to the facility in El Paso, with my mom, on the 1st day of sales. I remember watching the game play thinking.....this sucks. 😂. Thanks for the video! So well done.
There's one other minor issue that all arcade -> home conversions had to deal with. Most arcade games use a "portrait" display where the display is taller than it is wide, while televisions are "landscape" - wider than they are tall. Particularly when considering the resolution limits and such to get a game like pacman on a regular television at the correct aspect ratio requires using only half the pixels on the screen. So it's never going to look exactly like the arcade game.
The 2600 had the fabulous limitations that you mentioned. Keep in mind that Namco's arcade graphics processor (built from discrete components) was way ahead of its time in 1980. They had multi-colored sprites along with great color capabilities for the tiled background.
The 2600 was produced in the mid 1970s and had a much tighter budget for the hardware and particularly the graphics. It effectively had the capability of two sprites, so the ghosts all had to use a single sprite and alternate between redraws. It didn't use a tiled background at all, so the CPU had to effectively draw every single scan line as the scan line was needed. This included sprite placement, by the way. There were around 75 clock cycles per scan line, so positioning sprites and drawing the background had to be accomplished in 20 or 30 CPU instructions per line. Meanwhile, more modern hardware had video hardware that automatically drew the screen after the CPU set it up one time, allowing the program to do other things.
The 128 bytes of RAM didn't help, either. Pac-Man requires keeping track of the state of each dot, locations of player and ghosts, and scores. That much RAM is quickly consumed. Space Invaders is another game with outsized memory requirements for the 2600.
The reality was that the 2600 was built at the very leading edge of an extremely fast technological growth period and within a couple of years of its release it was very outdated. The TI-99/4 came out a couple of years later and already had what would become the standard tiled background along with general-purpose sprites. Other machines of the time had much more advanced capabilities - the Apple computers, Commodore VIC-20 and later 64, Radio Shack Color Computer series, etc.. Those systems were priced far above the 2600, but within a few years the prices had dropped. There was also the intellivision which had tiled background plus 8 sprites in the late 1970s. The 2600 couldn't compete with any of that due to video hardware limitations.
Yep, the 2600 really only had one advantage by the early 1980's and that was the sheer number of them in existence. On no technical measure did it still stand up at hat point, but even well into the 1980's it was by far the most common system anyone actually owned.
I remember as a kid wanting a 2600 solely for Pacman. Pacman was everything then. But then I saw it up close and was stunned at how bad it was. That was the first of many arcade-to-console/computer ports that disappointed my younger self. I was amazed when they did get it right - like Ms. Pacman on the C64. Nice video!
I bought a 2600 late, very late in it's run. a 4 switch wood grain. It came bundles with a Pac-man cart and Combat. I barely played Pac-man. I played mostly Activation games, like River Raid. I still have it. I think I paid $99 CDN for it. It was a lot of casual work for a HS Student. I
The fact that an inexperienced programmer was able to build that within the 2600's ridiculous 128 byte RAM limitation is amazing in and of itself. I remember when this game came out... I saw it and immediately went WTF. I had a 2600 and I did NOT buy this game. Oh btw, THANK YOU for not using a lame AI-generated narration. You'll get a new subscriber because of that alone.
For me and my sister THIS is the version of Pac-Man. We played for interminable hours at home and the possibility to go to an arcade and compare games was small. This was the first game we had and it lives in a special place in my heart.
It was the first "Pre Release" I got (Im 51). Atari 2600 Pac Man bought from Montgomery Wards store.
I'm glad I'm from the UK. We had so many computer games to play at that time that we weren't even aware there was any kind of crash in the US.
This is one of the most underrated channels out there!
Oddly I'd been thinking about this earlier today. Excellent video. Subscribed.
I was 8 years old in 1982 and I was thrilled to get Pacman on my Atari 2600! I certainly wasn't disappointed. I didn't even question the difference between the arcade version and the Atari 2600 version, for some reason.
I remember being SO EXCITED in 1982 when Pacman for the Atari 2600 was released. My parents took me to K-mart and there was a huge display for it with banners. It cost I think roughly $35 -- big money in those days. I eagerly took it home to play. I remember my little brother and I thinking 'What the heck?' once it loaded. Disappointing doesn't describe the feeling. It was like getting mugged. I never felt positive for the 2600 afterwards and soon switched to a Colecovision.
I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I got this game. Once I inserted into my VCS, all my excitement died. It was back to my local arcade for me to burn quarters!
Pack Man was the very first video game I played. I was 8 back in 1981. Our family went out to eat at Perkins, don't know if they're still around, but in the back by the jukebox were 2 video games. Galaga and Pac Man. So I ask my dad for some quarters. He gave me the 7 he had. He literally had to pull me away when our food came because I was in the middle of a game and I still had quarters left and I wanted to play video games than eat.
The one thing I didn’t like about it was the sounds. Just seemed harsh for a lack of a better term.
I played the Atari 5200 version first. I then got an Atari 65XE, with games on a floppy disk. Only then did I encounter the 2600 version, and it was so bad that I thought it was a bootleg. But apparently it was legit.