Pac-Man

Name:	Pac-Man
Company:	Atari
Model #:	CX-2646
Programmer:	Tod Frye
Year:	1981
Released?	Yes
Notes:	Ick!

Along with E.T., the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man will long be known as one of the greatest disappointments in the 2600's game library.  At the time of its release, Pac-Man was the most popular arcade game in the world, and therefore was Atari's hottest license.  After being hyped to death for months, Pac-Man was finally released to eager 2600 fans in March of 1982.  The response was unanimous, for Pac-Man fans everywhere were shouting"What the hell is this?"  That's right, Atari had dropped the ball on its biggest game ever, and Atari fans would never let them forget it.

The 2600 version of Pac-Man can best be described as adequate.  It appears Atari did the minimal amount of work possible to make a passable Pac-Man game.  Had it been any other game Atari fans would have passed it off as another dud and moved on, but this wasn't just any game, it was Pac-Man!  Atari had botched the most popular game in history and there was just no excuse.  After the months of hype, the advertisements stating that no other system would have Pac-Man, and the promise of everyone's favorite game coming home, Atari fans felt betrayed.  Everyone wanted to know the same thing; what happened to Pac-Man, and why didn't Atari fix it?

These questions are a bit hard to answer as no one even to this day has fessed up for the Pac-Man debacle.  Programmer Tod Frye claims he had made a much better 8K version of Pac-Man, but Atari wouldn't spring for the extra memory so he was forced to strip it down to 4K.  Atari management claims that no 8K version existed and that this was Tod's best effort.  Fans blame Atari for rushing Pac-Man into production, and Tod for doing a lazy mans conversion that could have been much better even at 4K.  Who's right?  I think there's a little truth to each side.

The bottom line is that the 2600 version of Pac-Man, while adequate, isn't very good.  Atari made much better versions of Pac-Man for the Atari 400/800, 5200, Intellivision, and Colecovision (under the Atarisoft label), but these versions could never make up for the botched 2600 job.  Pac-Man was the first sign that all mighty Atari could and would make mistakes.  Rumor has it that once word of mouth got around about how bad Pac-Man was sales dropped off almost immediately.  By the time of the crash Atari literally had millions of unsold Pac-Man carts sitting in its warehouses.  It was shoddy efforts like Pac-Man that showed Atari that 2600 fans wouldn't buy just anything with a popular name attached to it, a lesson Atari would soon learn with another bomb called E.T..

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