Yes, Pac-Man's voice was ridiculous, but like i said, this whole era and culture was completely retarded and based on junk: junk games to numb you, junk cereal based on junk games, and last but not least junk cartoons to go with junk cereal based on junk games to numb you. And Sue's make-up and voice hinting at saucy Dame-ness of that same era. Things like Clyde's derby hat as a symbol of this representing classic 1930's Thugdom. I therefore got a lot of the references that were admittedly over the heads of most little kids. Of course, it doesn't make any sense! I was lucky enough to have already been raised on the older films of Laurel & Hardy, James Cagney, and many others. I, too was psyched that they were going to make a cartoon out of it, but I loved it. Sure, we had loads of fun with it at the time, and I too played it every chance I had, whether it was in an actual arcade, at home on Atari 2600, or the table top version at a cocktail lounge. WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK PAC-MAN stood for? It was just a game! A simple, stupid game.

The aforementioned previous post says that the cartoon goes against things that the video game stood for. If one is going to attempt to make real sense out of the ridiculous era of early '80s cartoons based on products, then one is really barking up the wrong tree. I was in 3rd grade or something when it came out in 1982 and found that era of Saturday morning cartoons most agreeable. That's really special.I am going to beg to differ with the comment already posted on here, which basically lambastes the Pac-Man cartoon. The game rolled over back to level 1 again. When Pacman was rewritten, level 256 could finally be completed and WHAT HAPPENED THEN!!? Did the planets align? World Peace? The Holy Grail? No. Supposedly the level has never been beaten! Until. It became so popular that Billy Mitchell of Florida (the first guy to get a 'perfect Pacman score' which is: 3,333,360 points) offered anyone $100,000 if they could beat the split screen level. However, the left remained intact which led to the nickname for this level as 'The Split Screen Level' (see video below). In Pacman this meant that the right side of the screen became jarbled. Talk To Me Like I'm A 3 Year Old Version: The game can't handle numbers bigger than 255.Īnyways, if you get to level 256 the data can't handle it and funky things start to happen. Naturally, the biggest number formed with 2 digits in our decimal system is of course 99. Naturally the maximum hex that could be formed would be FF or 255 (remember in Zelda how you could only get 255 rupies?).

Data was commonly stored as a byte which could hold two hexadecimal digits. 0-9 followed by A-F which adds up to 16 digits. This led to a hexadecimal system for video game data instead of decimal. The goal was always to use as little as possible. Nerd Version: See at the dawn of video games, everything was about memory. Atari came after this.ĭoesn't it just piss you off when you play Pacman for 17 straight hours and you get to level 256 and the screen is all messed up? Yeah I never got by level 10 myself but if you're in that 1% of 1% who actually made it this far or if you just want to know where this is going, then read on. Keep in mind that we're talking Arcades here not consoles. It caught everyone by surprise and even the so called experts overlooked Pac-Man while reviewing arcade games (don't the experts always do things like that?). Renamed to Pac-Man in the US, it became an instant hit. Nobody had ever seen a game like it before. Namco and Iwatani may have developed 'Puck Man' in Japan, but it was Midway who marketed to the United States and saw sales fly through the roof. Strangely enough, it was NOT a big success after launch. After a short 18 months, the game was complete and launched as 'Puck Man'. This odd sounding name (odd only because it's not English of course) is symbolic of the noise made when one opens and closes their mouth rapidly.

Iwatani drew inspiration for his game via a famous Japanese phrase known as 'Paku-Paku Taberu'. Toru Iwatani designed the game over the short time of 18 months (yeah back then one guy could write a game on his own, imagine that today?). The company Namco gets the credit for developing the most popular arcade game of all time.

Pac man cartoon