In the spring of 1982 Pac-Man topped Electronic Games’ chart of the most popular arcade machines, and Atari owned the right to put it on its Video Computer System, the console in millions of American homes. On 3 April Atari took a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to declare “Atari National Pac-Man Day”. The cartridge cost $37.95, and shops were soon selling it for less.
Then people played it. The maze ran sideways, the dots were dashes, the fruit was a square “vitamin”, and the four ghosts shimmered in and out of sight. They flickered because the Video Computer System could draw only one ghost at a time. The game sold in the millions all the same. How many millions it sold, and how many Atari made, is a story that has grown in the retelling.
Fast facts
- Programmer: Tod Frye, at Atari.
- Released: spring 1982; Atari’s “National Pac-Man Day” was 3 April 1982.
- Price: $37.95.
- Cartridge: 4K of ROM.
- Players: one or two, with eight game variations and a children’s version.
- Ghosts: four, drawn one per frame.
One ghost at a time
The Atari 2600 has no screen memory. Its video chip, the TIA, gives a program two “player” graphics, each eight pixels wide, and the program rewrites them line by line as the television beam moves down the screen. Two players cannot show five characters wandering the same lines of a maze. Pac-Man stayed on the screen all the time, so the four ghosts had to take turns.
Frye’s answer was to draw one ghost per frame and cycle through all four. Mark Turmell, who wrote Turmoil, explained it to Electronic Fun with Computers & Games in November 1982: “The computer actually draws the ghosts one at a time… If you shot a picture of the screen, at any one time there would only be one ghost.” Each ghost appears in one frame out of four, about fifteen times a second on an American television, and the eye blends the flashes into four faint, flickering ghosts. JoyStik told its readers to test it for themselves: “Watch the game and blink your eyes rapidly — you’ll see what we mean.”
It cost the player more than looks. In January 1983 Electronic Fun found that “you can’t really tell with any accuracy whether they’ve turned blue and are ripe for eating or whether you’re going to attack them only to find that they can still destroy you. A risky situation at best.” Turmell thought Atari could have done better by never letting two ghosts touch, so that they did not pile up and pass through one another. The sprite flicker entry explains the general technique, which many later games used.
Memory was the other limit. Frye told Edge in 1998 that “the first Pac-Man was developed with a 4K ROM by just one man in five months,” and that the two-player mode “drastically ate into what little ROM there was”. When the project began, he said, 8K ROMs “weren’t available yet”, and “‘Pac-Man fever’ hit between the start and the finish of the project.”
What players found
The first reviews compared it with the arcade machine, and it lost. Video Games in August 1982 warned that “anyone who buys Pac-Man because they love the arcade game with the same name may wind up disappointed”: there were “dashes instead of dots”, a square vitamin in place of the fruit, and no music. Pac-Man himself “doesn’t look well. He’s a bit square and … just doesn’t zip around those corners in the maze like you’re used to.”
Electronic Fun made the same comparison against Atari’s own version for its 400 and 800 computers, which it found “very close to the arcade version”. On the VCS the maze was laid out horizontally with the escape tunnels at the top and bottom, the familiar “wocka, wocka” had become “an electronic boinging sound”, and the joystick control was “imprecise and, often, random”. By March 1983 Video Games was calling the game “Atari’s ‘Flickerman’”.
Not every reviewer was so hard on it. JoyStik began its December 1982 strategy guide by asking readers to “forget you’ve ever seen or played the original arcade version”, admitted that all the ghosts were the same colour, and concluded that “Atari’s Pac-Man is a very good home-video game”. It rated the graphics 6 and the game play 7.
How many cartridges?
Atari never published its production or sales figures for the cartridge, and later accounts disagree. In 1998 Edge wrote that Atari manufactured “some 12 million Pac-Man cartridges” in the expectation that the game would sell to every active 2600 owner and bring new buyers to the console, and that it sold seven million. The magazine added that “Atari never actually revealed how many of the seven million Pac-Man cartridges sold were returned for a full refund”. Retro Gamer gives the same twelve and seven million. In 2010, though, Edge wrote that “more than 12 million Pac-Man cartridges sold worldwide”, and quoted Atari’s former president Ray Kassar: “Pac-Man was our all-time best seller.”
All of these are later reconstructions. Taken together, they say the cartridge sold in very large numbers and that Atari made more than it could sell.
Afterwards
The disappointment fed the doubts that ran through the 1983 video game crash, alongside Atari’s rushed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that Christmas. Frye told Edge that “after the release of the game, Atari set a new rule that every game needed to have an 8K ROM”, and that Ms. Pac-Man, which followed on the 2600, “was developed with an 8K ROM by a three-man team in six months”. Looking back, he had “no particular technical regrets”: “I made the best decisions I could based on the technology available to me at the time. But six months later, if you asked me whether I would have done it differently? I’d say, sure.”
Sources
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 3, May 1982: “Most Popular Coin-Op Videogames” chart, with Pac-Man at number one.
- Vidiot, vol. 1 no. 1, October 1982, p. 40: Atari’s New York Times advertisement for National Pac-Man Day, 3 April 1982, and the cartridge on sale.
- Video Games, vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, pp. 74–75: the $37.95 price, and the review comparing the cartridge with the arcade game.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, vol. 1 no. 1, November 1982, pp. 30–32: Dan Gutman’s interview with Mark Turmell, on how the ghosts were drawn.
- JoyStik, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 36–37: strategy review, with the one-ghost observation, the 122 “Video Wafers”, eight variations, and ratings.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, vol. 1 no. 3, January 1983, pp. 82–83: Mark Wielage and Walter Salm, “The war between the states-of-the-art”, comparing the VCS and Atari 400/800 versions.
- Video Games, vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983, p. 71: “Atari’s ‘Flickerman’ (Pac-Man)”.
- Steve Wright, Stella Programmer’s Guide (Atari, 1979): the TIA’s two player graphics, written line by line.
- Edge, issue 58, May 1998, “Digital Disasters”, p. 78: Tod Frye on the 4K ROM, the five months, the two-player mode and the 8K rule; the 12 million manufactured and seven million sold; Atari’s silence on returns.
- Retro Gamer, issue 107, October 2012, “From the archives: March 1982”: 12 million produced, seven million sold.
- Edge, issue 217, August 2010: “more than 12 million Pac-Man cartridges sold worldwide”, and Ray Kassar’s comment.