Nearly everyone who’s ever heard of video games has heard of Pac-Man. There have been sequels, ports, and spinoffs for just about every video game system ever created, and this ubiquity virtually guaranteed that no matter what video game system you owned that you’d never be very far away from Hot Dot Munching Action ™. Unfortunately it also guaranteed that not all of the ports would be, shall we say, good.
The Atari 2600 was especially suited to mediocre ports of good games, and Pac-Man was no exception. The game was superficially identical to its arcade namesake: it had one unchanging level, it had ghost-shaped monsters, the main character is a roundish disc that must eat everything in the maze to progress.
There weren’t too many problems with this game. The maze layout was completely different than the arcade version, there were only three ghost-shaped monsters instead of four (and they were all the same color), the dots looked more like wafers, the sounds were completely wrong, there were no fruit-bonuses (but there were some bonus square-shaped things), the escape tunnels were on the top and bottom of the screen instead of the left and right sides, there were no acts between levels, and the game was ridiculously easy.
But otherwise it was completely identical.
I’m actually not sure I’ve ever played Pac-Man. But Ms. Pac-Man, well, that’s another story. I might have to go play right now.
Never played the original? Pac-Man gets his reputation for eating crazy things in that game, like keys, bells, and spaceships! (No kidding, look it up.)