Worse Than E.T.? Pac-Man And The Day Atari Lost The Video Game War

Is Atari 2600 Pac-Man worse than E.T. for The Atari 2600?
Or does it go deeper than that? Did the timing, release, and quality of the 2600 Pac-Man game combine together to make it worse than the sum of its parts?
We explore that in this video.
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[@Brazbit]

Pac-Man on the 2600 is one of my must play games. Any time I bust out the 2600 I play this game first. People complain about the tunnels being top and bottom. I counter that the tunnels are still on the long side of the screen, just your home TV is in landscape and the arcade was in portrait. None of the common complaints were important to me as a child and still are not today. It is a game that is recognizably Pac-Man and is very fun to play. I loved that every platform had a different take on games at the time due to their various limitations. I was just happy to have a fun cartridge to play at home.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

I love this perspective.

[@d.vaughn8990]

I was 12 when VCS Pac-Man was released. I played Pac-Man often in the arcade. I never expected the VCS version (of Pac-Man) to closely match the arcade…But I hoped that Atari would magically pull off a fun and charming representation - just as they did with Space Invaders, Missile Command and Asteroids. Unfortunately Atari failed miserably! My view is, if you were really young and/or did not play Pac-Man in the arcade - you loved Atari’s version. My mother absolutely adored this game! E.T. was a minor failure in comparison…

[@Jolt7800]

The research and the presentation of this Into the Vertical Bank episode is outstanding! Pac-Man Day was delayed for me. My local Big Box store was sold out for weeks and I would call almost daily to secure a copy. I ignored any concerns from my grocery store copy of Electronic Games and bought the Pac-Man Fever album on the same day I got the much hyped cartridge. I was not disappointed as much as the average kid who loved Atari. But in all honesty I did not play Pac-Man on the 2600, nearly as much as games I already had. “Lovers eyes” definitely blinded me to this landmark time in video game history.

[@steveafulton]

Thanks Jolt!! Love to hear your perspective.

[@jon-paulfilkins7820]

Speaking about the UK here. At the time a friend has a 2600 at home. It was a £199 at the time and like £50 for a cart. To give you a baseline, something like 5 years after I would start working in what was considered a well paying job for a school leaver earning nearly £80 a week. He slapped this in, and we were well, underwhelmed, disappointed, it lacked something. Here in the UK the VCS would remain the best selling console for the rest of the decade, Sega 2nd and Nintendo near nowhere until the SNES. But that would be peanuts compared to computer sales. I would soon see D&D Cloudy Mountain on the intellivision, Star Raiders on the 800, and play a text adventure of a family fiends very expanded ZX81. All of these engaged me in new ways. I would later buy an Atari 2600 from a car boot sale (not sure if that is a UK specific thing), but it was to keep mum from hogging my 800xl to play QIX! Yeah I remember seeing a Vetrex in shops when shopping for my first computer. It was impressive, but it was kind of a one or two trick pony, by my, those tricks were impressive.

[@steveafulton]

@@jon-paulfilkins7820 yeah, ultimately the Vectrex was a bit of a disappointment in 1983. It’s amazing now though

[@Trialwolf]

My copy of Pac-Man saw this from the shelf...... I think it needs a hug :).

[@steveafulton]

Apologies to him. I hope he’s holding up

[@Captureman]

I was 8 when Pac-Man came out for Atari. My brother and I went to Toys R Us, bought the game with our allowance money and were pretty pissed off once we got to play the game. I did learn to enjoy it for what it was but it was so far off base from what I had hoped it would have been that it made me view Atari in a lesser light going forward. We got E.T. for christmas that year and I actually liked it. We also got Raiders of the Lost Ark which I also enjoyed though it was extremely difficult to crack.

[@steveafulton]

I love Raiders!! It’s weird but actually quite fun to solve.

[@SoulforSale]

The challenge of Atari 2600 Pac Man was trying to get the most free men squares across the bottom of the screen.

[@Meebzorp5200]

Many, many people felt burned and betrayed by Atari when they bought this game. I recalled people raging and returning Pac-Man to the store. One failure like this a company could recover from. But E.T. later the same year? That was a 1-2 punch possibly no big company could come back from. The problem was the higher ups at Atari didn't respect programmers and thought that games weren't difficult to put together from a technical or creative standpoint. Which made no sense because they hired some of the best in the business for their art and graphic design departments (see Art of Atari book). It was obvious that Atari had lost the magic touch in 1982 as the genie was out of the bottle. Their videogame line never recovered but at least we got the Atari ST family of computers. I will say Jr. Pac-Man is a triumph of 80s 2600 programming. Wow, if only Pac-Man was more on par with Jr. Pac-Man. Too little, too late, of course.

[@steveafulton]

Yeah, the one-two punch was like “bookends” of disappointment while Coleco soared and the North American industry contracted. I don’t think people realize just how much “air was left out Atari’s balloon “ by those two games. It was devastating.

[@Meebzorp5200]

@@steveafulton Atari really needed to do damage control after these two releases and they didn't bother to try and make good on anything. They just kept chugging along. lol

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

They hired GCC to make arcade games for the 2600, 5200 and eventually the 7800 (oh and coin ops too), and many of them were of great quality for the 2600, but could not compare to ColecoVision. But, like you said, they never righted-wrong, they just plugged along like nothing happened. There is a 2nd part to this story where we discuss "Atari's Biggest Mistake" that will shed light on what we think should have been done in the first place so this never happened!

[@Meebzorp5200]

@@IntoTheVerticalBlank GCC were amazing but there wasn't much left of the gaming pie to get a slice out of for Atari until NES changed everything. Atari had nothing to fall back on to regroup since the C64 came out in 1982 and squashed their home computer division. Coin-ops seemed to weather the videogame crash but it wasn't enough. The suits and disrespect of programmers imo ruined Atari. I am curious to hear your part 2.

[@monolalia]

I *LOVE* VCS PAC-MAN! It is warm and friendly and yellow and blue instead of searing your retinas with all the colours of a fruit salad in spaaace! It goes a calming däng-däng-däng instead of causing high-frequency overload stress! It is meditative! It barely even flickers when you turn up the phosphor ghosting in your emulator! …I get that people who’ve played the arcade game first were disappointed. But it was one of my first video games, if not the first (it was either that or the lovely, quirky, cute, cuddly, tadpoley, excellent Pac-Man-derived Snack Attack on the Apple).

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

That's kind of the point of this. The "hype" for Pac- Man was the problem, the game itself fine in the abstract.

[@powerofvintage9442]

Interesting hypothesis...it would be interesting to overlay cartridge and system sales versus game releases / reviews.

[@gearsofgames]

Thanks for an interesting video! Nice to see a bit of a new angle on this!

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Thanks!!

[@serqetry]

I didn't know anyone making a huge deal about how 2600 Pac-Man wasn't arcade accurate when it came out. No 2600 ports were arcade accurate, and Pac-Man wasn't much worse than anything else. The best 2600 games were weird games that weren't arcade ports. 2600 Pac-Man still has it's charm... I always called it "Rubber band Pac-Man" because of that crazy TIA sound it makes when eating the "dots".

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

@@serqetry the magazines and press all turned on Atari after it was released.

[@serqetry]

@@IntoTheVerticalBlank I understand that, I was talking about players. We were happy with VFD Tomy Pac-Man and the Pac-Man watch. Our expectations of non-arcade hardware were not very high... that's what quarters were for. Or you could get an Atari 400 if you wanted a much better home Pac-man. I don't have much respect for the video game magazines that thought 2600 Asteroids was a great game... it should have gotten the same scathing reviews for making a mockery of a vector arcade game.

[@danleedev]

Pac-Man for the VCS is a bad port, but a fun game. I don't get the hate on this. It's leaps and bounds better than E.T, in my opinion.

[@fourthhorseman4531]

Now, 5200 Pac Man on the other hand...

[@steveafulton]

Yes actually that will be covered in an upcoming essay. We are producing it right now.

[@fourthhorseman4531]

@@steveafulton I'll keep my eyes open for that!

[@ecdhe]

There are many mistakes that Atari made under Warner Communications. But I would disagree that Pac Man was the reason why Atari lost the video game war. Pac Man was the symptom, not the root cause. As far as Pac-Man goes, Tod Frye actually was working on a kernel that would cut down the flickering (Ms Pac Man will end up using the same technique). But because nobody had done this before and due to short deadline, Frye gave up and kept the original kernel which splits one sprite for all 4 ghost, leading to ghosts being displayed once every 4 frames. Also, I suspect Frye does not have great artistic abilities. If he expressed regrets about the kernel, he never about the fact the maze looks nothing like the arcade maze.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

I've heard mixed stories about the short deadline. If it truly was short, that's still Atari's fault, and makes me further believe Kassar / Marketing were at fault.

[@ecdhe]

@@IntoTheVerticalBlank I'm not saying that Kassar was not at fault. I'm saying that the mistakes were already made at this point. As you pointed out, Atari had already lost most of their engineering. I would argue that even if Pac-Man had used a better kernel and had pleased fans Atari was still on its way out as it missed the changes in the gaming industry. Contrary to Nintendo it never made the post-arcade jump, didn't create franchises and never put forward a recognizable mascot.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Yes, of course. We actually believe the "biggest mistake" came much much earlier. the 2600 should have never been the "flagship" machine for Pac-Man. It should have been replaced in 1979. We are working on a follow-up about that.

[@ecdhe]

@@IntoTheVerticalBlank the main issue I see is that the guys at Warner Communications had no clue about the video game business (or computer business for that matter). I could talk on and on about the various mistakes that they made over the years.

[@AlexEvans1]

Yes, IMHO, it was all about unrealistic expectations due to the hype. People love to crap on VCS Pac-Man, but it wasn't bad, it was a typical VCS game.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Yes.

[@elijahvincent985]

What destroyed Atari? Impatient, greedy egomania. The usual corporation reasons. Poor Pac-Man wasn't a bad game. It was just a terrible port.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Yep.

[@kins749]

First time I've disagreed with you, but I hate VCS Pacman, it is an abomination. ET might be boring but it's a quality piece of work in comparison

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Healthy to disagree sometimes right? That's cool.

[@kins749]

@@IntoTheVerticalBlank Absolutely, the world would be a boring place if we all like the same thing

[@robanderson5673]

It wasn't that bad. On par with the port of Donkey Kong for the 2600. Plus it has the silver lining of making Ms. Pacman look like a miracle. Imagine if the homebrew version of Donkey Kong came out back in the day.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

@@robanderson5673 yep. Or Pac-man 4k. Jr pac-man was good too. The point is the Atari lost the gaming press abd never regained their footing after Pac-Man

[@JasonT-xp3kh]

Absolute worst home consol game ever. It pissed me off so bad that I didn't touch an atari product for over 40 years . Not a joke. They really screwed the pooch with this one.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

I had these feelings too, but stuck with Atari. It caused a lot of heartache for 40 years!

[@mwhite212]

Out of your mind and a ridiculous comment on its face. lol. It is not even remotely the worst console game ever.