creating Pac-man

The differences between arcade and 2600 Pac-man

maze and dots

The 2600’s graphics limited the number of dots on screen, and increased their minimum size. Atari compensated by calling them “video wafers” in the game manual. The vertical maze orientation had to change to fill the more horizontal 4:3 ratio of vintage televisions.

character animations

To conserve memory, Tod simplified animations, removing details like Pac-man’s vertical rotation, and the more complicated ghost animation, which had to be condensed into two-frame animations for the 2600.

Flicker

Tod utilised a flicker technique that strobed the ghost character graphics so that all four appeared on-screen at once – something that had never been done on the 2600 before. He also justified this approach, noting that the ghosts were ephemeral spirits. Though the method was successful, players complained about the constant flicker. Atari grilled Tod about it after the game’s release. Tod explained that the 4K memory prevented him from using a solution other than flicker. Not coincidentally, Pac-man was the last of Atari’s 4K games.

maze colors

The Atari 2600 version of Pac-man includes maze colours that do not match those of the original arcade game, which was a sore point for fans. The colours were Tod Frye’s own decision. “What I think is really interesting about that is that no one knew that a necessary part of the Pac-man signature was the colours,” he says. “And it’s easy for people to say, ‘Oh, it was obvious!’ But you know what? It clearly was not obvious.”

arcade sound

The delicate ‘waka waka’ eating sounds of the arcade Pac-man were replaced with the blunt bonking sounds generated by the 2600’s primitive sound chip. The urgent, jarring siren background sound was absent altogether.

Two-player gameplay

Later adaptations of Pac-man and Ms Pac-man dropped the option of two-player gameplay, a feature that Tod Frye refused to eliminate. The decision would have saved him precious bytes to utilise elsewhere, but he deemed it essential in capturing the spirit of the original.

Fruit vs vitamins

Arcade Pac-man’s levels are often designated by the different fruit – cherry, strawberry, orange and the rest. The bonus fruit are worth varying point totals, but had to be eliminated from the Atari 2600 version because of memory constraints. In their place, Tod used a rectangle within a rectangle shape, which Atari’s manual writers dubbed a ‘vitamin’.

cutscenes

A unique storytelling aspect of Pac-man was excised when the game translated from arcade to the 2600 home console. The whimsical animated interludes, a fun and brief respite from the fast-paced game itself, were removed to preserve memory for the crucial gameplay.