Pac-Man on Atari 2600

[Kamahl]

Both Pacman and ET could have been much better. Pacman has been totally remade (and is a million times better now), and ET had some fixes done by a fan that make the game way better. It's kinda funny but ET is actually a really impressive adventure game for the time.

[retro nick]

Edit: If this hasn't been brought up already, my understanding of 2600 Pac-Man was that the developer wanted more time to work on it, but after showing what he had so far after a week, Atari went with it as it was.

Yeah, the story I heard is that the programmer showed the management his WIP demo, and begged for more storage space on the cart. He promised them a much better game, if he could get more K to work with.

Management's response? They published the WIP demo.

Smart guys, those bosses at Atari were.

[Kamahl]

Smart guys, those bosses at Atari were.

Yeah, they weren't really functioning properly in the head...

Here's the fixed ET if anyone wants it:

http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

[NeoZeedeater]

I've seen it stated a time or 2 that E.T. is actually a pretty competent game for something that was given a week to develop. Most just didn't understand what needed to be done in-game.

I agree. I didn't put much time into it back in the day but I played through a few years ago and liked it.

The main reason for the crash would have been lack of quality control, leading to a glut of games that couldn't be sold. Once courts allowed 3rd party support(Atari tried suing Activision, former Atari employees, who usually made the consoles best games), Atari didn't seem to know how to handle that, and every company from Quaker Oats to Purina wanted a piece of the video game pie. It got to the point where there were so many games on the market, older games were being sold for 1/6th the price of new games, which made new game unprofitable.

I think this crash theory has debunked several times over now, and is often used more as an excuse to deify Nintendo than anything else. Following console generations have had lots of quantity and shovelware and survived just fine. Computer gaming has no first-party quality controls and does just fine. And most of the really garbage 2600 third-party games were obscure and sold in limited quantities. Games like Chase the Chuckwagon and Custer's Revenge were being played by a very small number of people.

[Moirai]

Pacman is actually very fun if you play it on game 6. It makes everything run very fast, which I feel makes out a bit more exciting. I prefer playing on game 6, difficulty B.

[midnightrider]

I think this crash theory has debunked several times over now, and is often used more as an excuse to deify Nintendo than anything else. Following console generations have had lots of quantity and shovelware and survived just fine. Computer gaming has no first-party quality controls and does just fine. And most of the really garbage 2600 third-party games were obscure and sold in limited quantities. Games like Chase the Chuckwagon and Custer's Revenge were being played by a very small number of people.

I dunno, it still sounds a more viable reason to me than "2 games sucked."

[gamevet]

I dunno, it still sounds a more viable reason to me than "2 games sucked."

Two games sucked is all it took for Time Warner to dump Atari. Atari published 12 million copies (there weren't even that many Atari 2600 owners at that time) of Pac-Man for the 2600 and only sold a little over 7 million copies. They did the same thing with E.T., by producing more copies of the game, then there were 2600 consoles on the market. ATARI showing massive losses for 2 consecutive years probably didn't sit well with retailers.

The market was also saturated with many different consoles, like the Colecovision, Intellivision, Atari 5200 and Emerson Arcadia 2001.

[old man]

The excuse I heard that management gave for publishing so many copies was that they thought people might like a copy for their ski lodge

[NeoVamp]

The excuse I heard that management gave for publishing so many copies was that they thought people might like a copy for their ski lodge

God I miss that 70's attitude.

[Segadream]

Good thing they made so many Pacman 2600 carts.
I love that cart and after years of use and storage mine has lost the labels and I guess they turned to molecule sized dust in the corner of my Atari game cabinet.
It holds a very fuzzy feeling inside my heart everytime I see and hear the beeps and boops of that carts sound effects.
I think it may have been this overly-critical response to the overall graphics that has in time pushed games created after to be so focused on graphics instead of content.
Today, I will agree the games have a lot of eye candy, but where is that luster that used to bring me back for more and more?....
I await the day that the ARCADE gets revived and they are more than those ticket spiting baby games.
I don't think it will ever happen again.
I took my kids to the Lakeshore Mall in Sebring Fl.the other day, and to my surprise the arcade that was there when I was a kid is still there.
Alas, there were no (in my opinion) machines that made me feel like going in, just those ticket spitters.
Which in my opinion must do something for them as my kids had to be pulled out of there once they seen and heard all the machines.
Another thing that threw me off was that they used a kind of credit card that you are supposed to load up and swipe to play the games.
I guess what I really would need is a time machine.

[j_factor]

I dunno, it still sounds a more viable reason to me than "2 games sucked."

Neither is the reason. The fact is, Atari made some stupid moves and fucked themselves over financially. Pac-Man and E.T. were part of that, but only part. Atari bleeding money contributed to the crash, not the other way around.

[theredlineboss]

I've always thought that 2600 Pac Man is a terrible representation of the arcade game, but if judged as a "clone", it's not bad. I dislike the sounds and the colors, but it's perfectly playable.

That said, I really cannot fathom why they did not try to replicate the game better. Matching the arcade's colors & making Pacman LOOK more like himself (why does he have an eye?) would have gone a long way, IMHO. It also wouldn't have hurt for them to at least *try* to imitate the startup sound. Both Pacman 4K and Pacman Arcade in the atariage store show what could have been.

-Rob

[sketch]

If you want to enjoy Pac Man on an Atari console, play Ms. Pack Man on the Atari Lynx. That is one of my favorite Pac Man ports of all time (I always preferred Ms. Pac Man to the original).

[spiffyone]

The problem with Pac-Man on 2600 is that it was not only a rushed port (I wouldn't call it "lazy", as the dev did the best he could under a very, very tight deadline imposed by Atari Inc.), but that it was indicative of Atari changing from being a stalwart of quality on their own console to being just one of many fly-by-night operations like so many other devs at the time. We all knew there was crap on the system, but the Atari label was taken to mean that a game wouldn't be crap (or so crap in comparison). Pac-Man threw that out the window. So too did E.T.

A trust was broken.

[spiffyone]

I think this crash theory has debunked several times over now, and is often used more as an excuse to deify Nintendo than anything else. Following console generations have had lots of quantity and shovelware and survived just fine. Computer gaming has no first-party quality controls and does just fine. And most of the really garbage 2600 third-party games were obscure and sold in limited quantities. Games like Chase the Chuckwagon and Custer's Revenge were being played by a very small number of people.

Agreed. The market simply wanted new hardware product at affordable prices. ColecoVision was doing fine, but Coleco had heavily invested in the 2600 market for software and didn't have the stomach to stick out the dwindling demand for that hardware. 5200 was too expensive and problematic. Then, of course, there was the rise of the home computer, best exemplified by Commodore 64, but also the earlier VIC-20 which Commodore marketed more directly against video game consoles (why buy a video game system when you can get a Commodore?), going so far as to offer rebates on Commodore computers with the trade in of a video game system iirc.