Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

Pac-Man did fairly well in Japan, but the game enjoyed wild success
in the United States. Pac-Man was more than a video game; it was a cultural
sensation, featured on the cover of Time and spawning dozens of licensed
products including clothing, trading cards, cereal, board games, a record
(Pac-Man Fever), television shows, and consumer goods. There are many
reasons for the game’s success. Novelty was undoubtedly a part of it. Journalist
Chris Green has argued that Pac-Man fi lled a space in popular
culture between the second and third Star Wars fi lms, making it a cornerstone
in 1980s popular culture. But beyond these feats of novelty and
timing, Pac-Man was, and perhaps still is, a game that everyone will be
happy to play. The game’s colorful, friendly characters made everyone
want to try it—boys and girls, men and women alike. Green explained:
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Pac-Man feels like a cartoon, from the bouncy theme music to the
animated eyes on the ghosts to the forlorn sound effect as Pac-Man
is apprehended and shrinks away to nothingness. Far more so than
any other game before it (and many that came after), Pac-Man possessed
elements of drama, giving names to its avatars and featuring
them in brief comic interludes that played out after the player had
achieved a certain level of success. 2
It was into this cultural context that Atari released its VCS version
of Pac-Man in 1982. The home videogame market operated alongside
the arcade videogame marketplace, both enjoying signifi cant popular
and fi nancial success. Arcade games continued to be built on ever more
sophisticated technical infrastructures—ones that were increasingly
distant from the Atari VCS, whose design was now more than half a decade
old. Still, the massive popularity of arcade games motivated ports of these
increasingly sophisticated popular coin-op games. After the VCS port of
Space Invaders enjoyed considerable success, partly rescuing Atari from
the losses of 1977–1978, the company became even more interested in
arcade ports. Pac-Man seemed like a fruit ripe for the plucking, or perhaps
even the key to Atari’s continued success.
From a very high level, at a glance, a VCS Pac-Man conversion might
seem like it would be straightforward. Although Adventure was a huge
risk—a game totally different in form from those that preceded it—the
PDP-10 Adventure was also entirely unknown to a popular audience, so
VCS consumers had no basis for comparison. Pac-Man involved adapting
an extremely prominent arcade title whose gameplay, graphics, sounds,
and even iconography and packaging were universally understood and
already based on graphical display and collisions. The reality of the project