Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
Box art (variation #2).
Developer	Atari
Publisher	Atari Sears (Telegames version) Futuretronics (Australia) Polyvox (Brazil)
Series	Pac-Man series
Game system(s)	Atari 2600
Genres	Maze
Release date(s)	US: March 16, 1982 JP: 1984 (?)
Number of players	1-2 players

The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is an infamous port of the Pac-Man arcade game, released by Atari in 1982. While a massive success commercially, the game has been heavily criticized for its differences from the arcade original; often panned due to its poor controls, graphics, and sounds.

Gameplay

The core gameplay of the original remains the same, but there are many key differences:

• The game uses a flicker effect to allow more sprites on the screen at a time. This can make the game hard to play if it is not on original 2600 hardware, as the flickering isn't handled well on more current devices.
• The maze design is different, as are the sound effects and scoring system (going by intervals of 1, instead of 10 like the arcade does).
• The ghosts always immediately pour out of the center box, even on the early levels (which is not the case with the arcade version). They also do not have four distinct personalities, meaning their movements are randomized.
• The colors of the ghosts were changed to look pale green/yellow.
• The dots Pac-Man eats were changed to dashes and renamed to "video wafers". There is also only one fruit, which is called a "vitamin".
• The Escape Route (tunnel) runs from the top and bottom of the screen, rather than the sides.
• An extra life is earned with the clearing of each maze.

As with many early 2600 releases, the packaging claims there are 8 "games" on the cartridge; in actuality, these are really just slight variations of the normal game mode. Additionally, each variation has a two-player mode, making for 16 settings total.

Scoring

• Eat video wafer–1 point
• Eat power pill–5 points
• Eat vitamins–100 points
• Eat ghosts–20, 40, 80, 160 points (in succession)

Game Variations

A slow or a fast-moving Pac-Man can be chosen. Variations with ghost speeds can be chosen as well, due to their ratings of having "crawl", "walking", "jogging" or "running" speeds, along with expert and childrens' versions. Putting the Difficulty Switch in the "A" position cuts down the time the ghosts stay blue, while the "B" position reduces the time limit to eat vitamins (making them disappear more quickly).

Development and release

Despite numerous rumors surrounding the game's development, Pac-Man had a fairly normal development cycle compared to other Atari 2600 productions of the time. The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man was programmed by Tod Frye, and was in development for about four months. Frye believes that the majority of the game's issues were the result of the two-player mode using up much of the ROM space, as well as a lack of available RAM. Some other commonly criticized features were actually creative decisions by Frye: including the unconventional color scheme, and the "escape route" being at the top and bottom of the screen.

Frye was aware of a better flicker-reduction technique that was later used in the 2600 port of Ms. Pac-Man. However, Frye claims a condescending Atari supervisor told him that no one had ever used such code before. Frye, allegedly on probation at the time, took this as some sort of indirect disapproval from the supervisor; leading to him not implementing any method to reduce flicker. After the game had already been finished, Atari's marketing department did take issue with the flickering; Frye stated to Atari he "could have done better" with an 8K ROM chip, as the final Pac-Man cartridge uses a 4K chip. In recounts of these events, Frye snickered and remarked, "What did [they] expect?".

A promotional image taken during Atarinational Pac-Man Day

Atari had prepared a large promotional campaign for Pac-Man's 2600 debut. Atari would dub April 3rd, 1982 as "Atarinational Pac-Man Day", holding various events across the United States (as well as a few European countries). While the exact total is unknown, several million Pac-Man 2600 cartridges were produced in 1982 alone; allegedly, Atari made more Pac-Man cartridges than the total amount of already-sold 2600 consoles. Pac-Man was also included as the "pack-in" game bundled with some Atari 2600 systems.

By the end of 1982, over 7 million copies of Pac-Man for the 2600 were sold at retail, making it the best-selling game on the system; roughly 1 million additional copies were sold from 1983 to 1990. It is unknown if this total includes pack-in sales or regional variants.

Home Ports

Due to the Atari 2600 version's notoriety, several additional home ports based on the Atari 2600 release would be produced beginning in the late 2010s:

• Atari 7800
  • Included in Pac-Man: Double Feature (alongside a newly-developed Atari 7800 version), released in 2025 by Atari SA.
• Atari Jaguar
  • A canceled port from the 1990s, which was planned to be included in the Virtual VCS compilation. The available prototype is a very primitive Atari 2600 emulator, and lacks collision detection.
• Electronic handheld games
  • An emulated version of the game is included on the Atari Retro Handheld: Pac-Man Edition console by Blaze, released in December 2019 (which marked its first official release in 37 years).
  • An originally-programmed recreation of the game was also featured on the Tiny Arcade: Atari 2600 system, released by Super Impulse in late 2021.

Early promotional images for the 2017 version of the Atari Flashback Portable by AtGames show the original Atari 2600 version on the box, but the game was replaced with Pac-Man 4K in the final release (under questionable licensing).

Atari Gamestation series

The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is planned to be included in the "Atari Gamestation" line of consoles by My Arcade, alongside the original arcade version. This includes the Atari Gamestation Go, a tablet-like handheld system, and the Atari Gamestation Mega, a large tabletop arcade machine.

A separate set of "Gamestation Retro: Bandai Namco X Capcom" consoles are also planned; while featuring Pac-Man titles, the Gamestation Retro line does not include the Atari 2600 version.

Atari 50 DLC

The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is included in the "Namco Legendary" DLC pack for Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. This release also features the Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computer versions of the game, alongside various iterations of four other Namco titles (Galaxian, Galaga, Dig Dug, and Xevious); the DLC also includes developer interviews and historical material.

The original Atari 50 compilation was released for the Atari VCS, PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. The Namco Legendary DLC pack was released on all listed platforms save for the Atari VCS.

Trivia

• Starting in the late 1990s, several homebrew developers began producing new ports of Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. These were mainly created due to the infamously poor reception of the original, in order to see how much better Atari's Pac-Man could have theoretically been (see this page for more information). The most notable of these titles is Pac-Man 4K; which is widely considered to be a very impressive port, and has been referenced in some official Pac-Man media.
• Atari negotiated the Pac-Man home console rights directly with Namco of Japan in late 1980; roughly the same period as Bally Midway acquired the greater arcade and merchandising rights for Pac-Man. This made Atari among very few U.S. companies at the time to not directly license through Midway (save for attributing trademark rights).
• The exact date that Pac-Man for the 2600 released is unclear. It is commonly credited as being April 3rd, 1982, due to that date marking Atarinational Pac-Man Day; however, multiple retailers had the game available throughout March, with the earliest known date being March 16th. The most likely explanation is that there was no "set" release date for Pac-Man, and retailers began selling the game whenever their copies came in.
• Pac-Man and E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (another commonly criticized Atari 2600 game) became the scapegoats blamed for the downfall of Atari, and to an extent, the Video Game Crash of 1983. In truth, neither game is a direct cause of these events; though they did somewhat contribute towards the phenomenon, in that they lowered consumers' views and trust of the Atari brand.
• The level "Dungeon" in Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is seemingly based on this game.
• In early U.S. Pac-Man media, Pac-Man's enemies were generally referred to as monsters. The 2600 version was among the earliest pieces of media to call them ghosts; the 2600 release greatly popularized this concept, with most (if not all) media following dubbing them as ghosts.
  • It has been theorized that Atari referred to the enemies as "ghosts" as a way to explain the flickering effect; however, this is unconfirmed.
• The Atari 2600 Pac-Man promotional artwork was illustrated by Hiro Kimura. Originally, Kimura submitted a drastically different design for the box art, compared to both the final release and other Pac-Man media in general. Atari rejected this design, feeling it would cause confusion and potentially scare children; as such, Kimura created two alternate covers, which were approved by Atari.
  • Kimura would later loosely revisit his rejected 2600 cover for the Atari 400/800 release of Pac-Man; though the designs were made friendlier in comparison, in addition to coloring Pac-Man yellow instead of chrome. The 400/800 cover was approved by Atari, though some reprints instead reuse the Atari 2600 artwork.
• There is a bug in the game where if Pac-Man dies at the top of the Escape Route while moving down, he can move through walls while the death sequence plays.
• Pac-Man was planned to release on the Atari 2800, a Japanese rebranded version of the Atari 2600; however, "2800" copies of the game are noted as being extremely uncommon. The game appeared in little to no promotional material for the system (with one Pac-Man image even being removed on later revisions of the console's box), and did not appear in Atari's "master list" of software, dated January 1984. This suggests the game may have never actually been released at retail in Japan; or was only released during a very brief window in 1984, presumably prior to the Atari company being sold in July of that year.
• The game's sounds were recorded by Sound Ideas and became a commonly used stock sound effect; this led to 2600 Pac-Man sounds being used in many other forms of media, such as the Mooninites from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The usage of the stock sound effect is referenced in the Atari 50 DLC interviews.
  • Several future Pac-Man titles, such as Pac-Man: Adventures in Time and Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, feature the Atari 2600 version's sound effects in certain (minor) parts of the game. The sounds were also sampled in the theme song for the Italian dub of the Pac-Man animated series. It is unclear if these were intentional references to the 2600 port, or if they (ironically) used the 2600 Pac-Man sounds unknowingly from the stock source.
• Several recent Pac-Man products (from the late 2010s onward) use artwork designs based on the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. It appears that Bandai Namco provided merchandising rights to the "Atari" designs beginning in 2017, as part of the licensee Pac-Man Retro Style Guide. The art assets are also used on wallpapers in Pac-Man Museum +.

Gallery

Screenshots

B&W TV mode

the game over screen

Artwork

Prototype artwork

Final artwork, version 1

Final artwork, version 2

Pac-Man

Pac-Man and Ghosts

Ghosts

External links

• AtariAge Pac-Man page for links to (mostly negative) reviews, among other information