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

a very unusual production run, given that there was an active base of only
ten million VCS consoles. 8 At the time, Atari executives reasoned that
Pac-Man’s popularity in the arcade would drive purchases of VCS hardware,
thus increasing demand for the game.
However, the cartridge’s limitations and compromises led to less
than anticipated interest in the game—much less. Atari did sell an impressive
seven million copies of the game, but that still left millions to languish
in the warehouse or to be returned unsold. 9 This was a massive
fi nancial disaster. In the wake of Pac-Man’s commercial reception, retailers
began to mistrust the videogame industry. Their suspicions would be
confi rmed with even more licensed games of dubious quality that same
year—most prominently, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Pac-Man contributed
to a chain reaction of reduced retail commitment to home console video
games, resulting in the so-called videogame crash of 1983, which is discussed
in more detail in chapters 7 and 8. While larger companies like
Atari and Activision survived in some form, the many smaller companies
producing games for consoles quickly went out of business. It was not
until Nintendo released its NES in 1985 that the U.S. videogame market
recovered from this dark age.
In the videogame fan world, represented by posts from the Atari
amateur community and fan-authored historical documents like Wikipedia’s
pages on the game, blame for the poor quality of the original VCS
Pac-Man is leveled squarely at Frye and Atari. Indeed, both programmer
and company may have overreached in their attempts to gobble
dollars.
Frye developed the game from a prototype that he had been working
on when Atari acquired the game rights. The company pressured him to
use this incomplete version instead of starting over again so that the game
could be released in time for the 1981 Christmas season. Despite the
strong technical limitations under which he worked, Frye had an incentive
to attempt the best work he could in the space and time he was given.
Atari CEO Ray Kassar fi nally responded to the possibility of Frye and other
senior programmers being hired away by offering them a royalty on sales
of the cartridges they developed. Frye would get ten cents for every Pac-
Man unit sold. Once the game shipped and money started rolling on, Frye
made no secret of the wealth he was amassing. This didn’t endear him to
his coworkers, even though they were substantially better off because of
the new royalty arrangement. 10 For Atari’s part, the company rushed
the game to market at the lowest possible cost in order to capitalize
on the license alone rather than on a careful, well-crafted rendition of
the game.
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