On a lot of pages on this wiki, I've added information about how the Pac-Man rights got completely messed up around 2006. I'm sure this has confused a lot of people, and there is no easily-accessible information on it, as it was pretty much (intentionally?) buried. I decided to make this blogpost to summarize what the hell happened, to the best of my knowledge. Some details may be inaccurate, but this is all the information I've uncovered through my own research.
- In 1981, the Crazy Otto prototype was created by General Computer Corporation. It was then sold to Midway and rebranded as Ms. Pac-Man. GCC later went on to code Jr. Pac-Man in 1983.
- The rights to Ms. Pac-Man were turned over to Namco (creators of the OG Pac-Man) in the early 80s.
- In the rights turnover, it was agreed that GCC would be paid royalties for every Ms. Pac-Man machine sold, a̶l̶o̶n̶g̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ (SEE 4/4/2020 UPDATE BELOW). GCC went a step further, coding most of the Ms. Pac-Man ports themselves (including the Atari 2600/7800 versions).
- Namco just sort of...forgot this? And started releasing Ms. Pac-Man ports without paying GCC at all. I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶s̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶1̶9̶9̶3̶ ̶N̶E̶S̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶o̶n̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶p̶o̶r̶t̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶v̶o̶l̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶.̶
- GCC didn't realize this for over a decade, until one of the idiot employees from the 80s saw a Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine (which released in 2000) right in front of him.
- Either GCC or the group of guys who actually coded Crazy Otto (I can't tell) take Namco to court, and not only get the rights to the game back, but the character too! Namco now had to pay royalties to use them (well, technically they did anyway, they just didn't until that point), which I guess they were too cheap to ever pay.
- This was notably exactly at the time when Namco merged with Bandai to form Namco-Bandai-Whatever-They're-Going-By-Now, which probably led to them not caring less about trying to get the rights back.
- Proving this court case made literally no sense, Namco was allowed to use Ms. Pac-Man if they did so on...arcade machines without coin slots. As in the ancient copyright contract which doesn't meet modern video game standards, it referred to arcade machines as "coin-operated games". This is why Ms. Pac-Man only appears on the "home version" of Pac-Man's Arcade Party and Pixel Bash.
- Its possible (actually pretty likely) that this entire thing is what caused Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness 2 to be canceled, but afaik that was only due to Namco Hometek shutting down.
- This entire thing was kept secretive until 2015, in which some live presentation thing was held called "Ms. Pac-Man Postmortem". The first half is an 80s GCC employee talking about the history of Crazy Otto/Ms. Pac-Man, while the second half is him bragging about how much money he made by screwing over Namco.
- In the presentation, in this guy's many attempts to criticize Namco, he has a major slip-up. He admits that NAMCO was the one who designed the Ms. Pac-Man character, not GCC (or even Midway). I believe this led to Namco getting the character rights back; its hard to say for sure, as there hasn't been a major Pac-Man game recently. But she's certainly appeared in a lot of toys and stuff, and was playable in Sonic Dash.
- As a side note, I think GCC was the one who created this horrifying thing . Then Namco said "hell no" and created the final design for her.
- Namco decides releasing the bare minimum for Ms. Pac-Man is better than nothing, and starts using that "coin-operated game" rule in clever ways. They partnered with many toy companies to release Ms. Pac-Man mini arcade machines and junk, none of which feature GCC's precious coding (its either originally programmed or the aforementioned NES port). Shockingly, we haven't gotten an Arcade1UP yet, but I'm sure we will soon...
Writing this ruined my day. I can practically only associate the Pac-Man series with negativity these days. And honestly? GCC is the cause of that. They knew Namco was merging with Bandai, causing lots of ownership changes in the process anyway, and knew they wouldn't even bother fighting back. GCC is a goddamn printer company now; there was NO reason for them to do this, and in the end Namco just stopped using Ms. Pac-Man (and all the other games/characters) altogether. If you only care about the money "your" video game makes, and not the passionate players of said game who made it the groundbreaking success it was, you are scum. Damn printer companies...
(was that last paragraph too mean? i feel like it was. sorry, printer company)
UPDATE 10/4/2019: Since the recent AtGames shit has shed more light on the terms of the GCC agreement, I thought I should correct some things that were incaccurate here (not that it matters, since there's a 90% chance Ms. Pac-Man will never be used again at this point anyway):
- The GCC of today (the goddamn printer company) doesn't seem to have been involved with the Ms. Pac royalties at all. Instead, the royalties just went to various GCC employees from the 80s. I figured this could have been the case, but wasn't entirely sure.
- The majority of dates I listed were wrong. I believed the court case ended in 2006, but the recent lawsuit says it was "around 2008".
- Namco never got the full rights to the Ms. Pac-Man character back. They just willingly paid GCC to use her for a handful of things recently.
Everything else here is still pretty accurate.
UPDATE 4/4/2020: Updating the original fiasco instead of the second one? Well, something occured to me that I somehow didn't realize before. I stated here that in the early 80s agreement, Namco had to pay GCC for all home console ports of Ms. Pac-Man. In actuality, that...isn't true at all. That was decided by the court in the 2000s lawsuit because of some weird wording in the agreement, similarly to the "coin-operated game" rule.
This means that, effectively, GCC...cheated the court system. While the judge helped them cheat. They NEVER had ANY royalty contract for home usage of Ms. Pac-Man before the lawsuit. And then they had to be paid royalties for the Ms. Pac-Man character too, for whatever reason. GCC solely went to court over wanting Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine royalties (which I figured they chose just because it was the EASIEST to sue over), and managed to get...all of the Ms. Pac-Man royalties...
I used to give General Computer Corporation the benefit of the doubt over this case, at least compared to AtGames. But clearly, GCC were just as shady as their plug & play-producing brethrin all along...