pac-mania’s pixel pusher

computer artist Jay gunn worked on all the home versions of pac-mania at grandslam

First of all can you tell us how you got the job at Grandslam and how you were able to land the Pac-mania job in particular? I was working as a very young freelance games artist after leaving school. I applied for a job at Grandslam in Rotherham and one of the first jobs that I was given was converting the Pac-mania arcade game to all home formats.

Were you already a fan of Pac-man yourself and was it exciting to work with such an iconic character?

Like most Eighties kids I was a big fan of the Pac-man arcade game. My bedroom was covered in Pac-man stickers and I have fond memories of playing the game in the arcades. I spent a lot of my time drawing the graphics from those games in school notebooks.

Had you played Pac-mania before you got the conversion gig and what did you make of it?

I was a big fan of Pac-mania from playing it in the arcades and we got the actual arcade machine shipped into our office shortly after it was released. It had a very large display screen and it was quite unusual to see those types of isometric graphics in an arcade game.

Were you given any of the original source material to work with?

Not on Pac-mania, I had to copy the sprites and graphics by hand. I had the arcade machine stood next to me so it came in very handy for referencing. Later we could rip the graphics from the arcade machines but the art assets always looked like neon pixelated vomit and needed a big amount of work to make them workable.

Which version was the most challenging to create and why?

The C64 version was very challenging because of that annoying elongated 2x1 pixel ratio and the » [Arcade] Jay was well aware of Pac-mania before converting it as he had often played it in his local arcade. fact that we had a very low screen resolution and very little useable RAM.

What version of Pac-mania was your favourite one and why?

Without a doubt that would be the Amiga version because we could make it full screen and use the borders of the display area. It was quite unusual for games from that time period to be fullscreen and it was common place to have the game running in a window with a large border panel which would save on process power. We would usually place the onscreen elements such as score, lives and the title of the game in the border panel.

We’ve got to ask: are you afraid of ghosts?

I love ghosts! In fact, I’m working on a comic book Coal Face which is set in the Eighties game development scene and draws on my time making games when I was a kid. It features many ghosts of that era. You can read more about it on my twitter page at: @Gunncomics.