“The effort was To catch The essential Feeling, The ethos, The spirit – The soul of Pac-man”
His wall-walking habit ended abruptly when he smacked a ceiling-mounted sprinkler with his forehead, requiring 23 stitches.
with talent and quirkiness to burn, Tod appeared to be a perfect match for Atari. But during a crucial review, Tod’s boss suggested that he wasn’t fitting in well – and should consider looking for another job. “He said, ‘Look, you’re probably a real good programmer, but you’re not putting out,’” Tod recalls. The conversation stunned the young game designer and left a lasting impression. He smoked one more joint, and threw up. Tod then went completely sober for almost a year while working on Pac-man. The game was a chance to prove his worth at Atari. “I buckled down,” he remembers.
Translating the hit game to the 2600’s primitive hardware was a serious challenge, and the programmers knew it. Colleague Bob Polaro passed on Pac-man because he thought it impossible, selecting another arcade conversion instead – the popular Defender. Tod accepted the Pac-man assignment, spending 80-hour weeks over the next six months trying to create a worthy version of the game on lesser hardware. “I was sufficiently unprofessional that I gave my very best,” he says. The difficulty of the task sharpened his work habits and dedication.
The Atari 2600 was initially created to play Pong variations and Tank games, staples of the Seventies arcade era. The machine wasn’t designed to play sophisticated arcade-style games that
Atari was now trying to create. So, it was quite a technological achievement to tackle Pac-man. “There’s a lot of tradeoffs involved,” Tod explains. “It’s a very, very constrained system.”
Hindsight makes the translation seem like straightforward, but that is surely revisionist history. The coin-op Pac-man machine used a custom-made arcade system board with hardware running three times as fast as the 6502 microprocessor which powered Atari’s 2600. The arcade game contained 16K of ROM, 2K of video RAM and 2K of general RAM, whereas the Pac-man 2600 cartridge was limited to 4K of ROM in total – one quarter of the arcade machine. The 2600 also had less ability to display background graphics, which meant that any maze Tod created would have to be simpler and blockier, utilising chunky playfield graphics. In designing this version, he’d need to execute some clever programming tricks just to make it happen.
Faced with extensive (and necessary) compromises, Tod took a pragmatic view of translating Pac-man. “I was thinking of it as an abridged adaptation,” he said, “and the effort
was to catch the essential feeling, the ethos, the spirit – the soul of Pac-man. Pac-man was known to be a repeated pattern game. So, I worked out a very precise, repeatable logic for how the ghosts worked. It was not the one [arcade Pac-man creator Toru] Iwatani used, but that wasn’t computationally possible for me. What that actually means is, like coin-op Pac-man, my Pac-man produces completely reproducible patterns. If you do the same thing every game, it will do the same thing every game. And that’s actually the level at which I understood the ethos or spirit of Pac-man. It’s a fundamental. I really honestly intended my Pacman to be as faithful a representation as I deemed possible and necessary.”
The game arrived to much fanfare, and its initial performance did not disappoint. Sales were stratospheric, and Pac-man would go on to be the bestselling Atari 2600 game of all time, moving a reported 7.7 million cartridges and earning nearly $200 million in gross profits for Atari. But a growing discontent began to fester beneath the glowing balance sheet. On 11 May 1982, Electronic Games Magazine published its first-ever bad review for an Atari videogame, saying, “Considering the anticipation and considerable time the Atari designers had to work on it, it’s astonishing to see a home version of a classic arcade contest so devoid of what gave the original its charm.” Softline computer magazine wrote that the 2600 version looked “less like Midway’s original than any of the pack of imitators”.
Tod’s concessions to the 2600’s hardware were obvious to devoted fans. The maze colours were different, the characters less detailed, and the game seemed to underscore the console’s advanced age. For his part, Tod was unaware of the criticism, already working on his ambitious Swordquest series. “I didn’t really know about all of the bad press for a long time,” he says. “I was doing the next thing.” The 2600 version of Pac-man would eventually unfairly acquire the reputation as a half-hearted effort, a corporate cash-in. Early video game journalists certainly didn’t rush to Tod’s aid, either. Harsh reviews were just “part of the meat grinder Pac-man went through”, he later decided.
you know what I say? Fuck the press,” Tod retorts, now with 37 years of reflection. “Pac-man was very, very credible. The things the press doesn’t like were just the fact that it was the first. We would have fixed the obvious, easy-to-fix things that people harp on, if anyone anywhere in the human species had known at that point. No one knew. History was being made. We were just finding out what the rules were. That’s what it is to be a pioneer.”
Some within Atari felt the game wasn’t ready for prime time. Atari’s marketing manager of coin-ops, Frank Ballouz, said in a 1998 interview, “I took a look at this bullshit game and told Ray [Kassar, CEO of Atari] that no one’s going to want to play it. But he didn’t listen to me.” But that seemed to be a minority opinion, as many Atari programmers were impressed with Tod’s translation and what he was able to squeeze out of the aging 2600.
“The idea of what it meant to be a faithful representation of Pac-man was not established,” Tod says. “It did not exist at the time I wrote Pac-man.
No one else in that whole process really knew it. [Later], we, as a culture,