Atari 2600 Pac-Man Really Gets a Bad Rap

Atari 2600 buffs will loudly declare Pac-Man to be one of the worst games ever released for the Video Computer System, up there with E.T. This usually includes discussion of the supposed landfill that's loaded with unsold copies of these games.

Is the game itself bad? No, not at all. I think the problem is that it was so different from the arcade game. The colors are different. The sound effects don't come close to the arcade's. No fruit. Everything Pac-Man eats is some form of rectangle. The tunnels were rotated 90 degrees. The maze drastically changed. There were no intermissions. Instead of one bonus life, the Atari VCS version offered one bonus life every time you cleared the board -- way too easy compared to the arcade version. It was allegedly a rush job for which Tod Frye supposedly collected a huge paycheck. There are even theories that Atari intentionally made the 2600 version bad so that they could boost sales of the 5200, whose Pac-Man conversion was very faithful to the arcade version; however, given the time lapse between the release of the 2600 version of Pac-Man and the release of the 5200 system, it's highly unlikely. Many people blame the VCS Pac-Man for the beginning of the great video game crash.

Having said all that, does the Atari VCS Pac-Man deserve its bad reputation? I for one think not. Dig my situation when it came out. I was eight or nine years old. If I wanted to play an arcade game, I had to go with my parents to the local Kroger, where they usually had two games up by the registers. And it was a huge deal when they brought in a pirated Pac-Man machine; of course, back then I didn't realize it was pirated -- I just thought the reason the sign was hand-drawn and that the cabinet and joystick were different from what I'd seen in pictures was that it was a refurbed model! Of course, I had to pray that I had a quarter or that one of my parents would be generous enough to give me a quarter to play, which didn't happen all that often.

Eventually a couple of arcades opened up within a few miles of where we lived. One of them I never set foot in, and the other one I only set foot in once, and that was because my brother really wanted to go there the day we threw a going-away party for him before he left to join the Army. So a bunch of us youngsters in the family joined him. My parents never took me to an arcade...

...except for our monthly trips to the Lincoln Mall in Matteson, Illinois...the nearest shopping mall at the time. On the first floor near Montgomery Ward was Bally's Aladdin's Castle, which to this day is the best game room I ever set foot in. It was huge in its prime, and they had pretty much everything you could want to play. My allowance on our monthly trips: one dollar, which gave you four video game tokens. My dad didn't have a heck of a lot of patience, so if somebody was hogging a machine I really wanted to play, I had to play something else. But that one dollar was all I ever got, plus any tokens I found on the floor -- if I found a token on the floor, my dad allowed me to use it; he wasn't that impatient.

Other than that, what did I have to play? Our trusty Atari 2600 at home, which my brother and I got as a Christmas present in 1983. If I wanted to play Pac-Man, it was the 2600 version except for the monthly mall trip. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was all I, and many of my friends and my cousins, had. And we really loved it, too. Even my brother, who was old enough to drive and could go to the arcades pretty much whenever he wanted to (and he did go a lot -- Zaxxon and Battlezone were his games, if I recall correctly), would get into the 2600 version of Pac-Man, and he played one night until he scored well over 100,000 -- considering the highest score you can get in one move is 160 points, that's not an easy thing to do. I still remember the highest score I recorded: 90,723.

The game play was still there. And the differences from the arcade version presented new challenges...all the monsters (called "ghosts" in the 2600 version) moved at the same speed, the maze was larger, and the collision detection was very sensitive -- so sensitive that, unlike with the arcade version, in which the monster practically had to travel through you to kill you, you died if the slightest hair of a ghost touched you.

The Atari 2600 Pac-Man will always have a special place in my heart. To this day, when I pull out my old 2600 (which I do as much as I can), it's one of the first carts I reach for. Was it the best arcade conversion? Not by a long shot (I think Jr. Pac-Man was the best), but boy, did I -- and do I -- love it.