Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
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The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, developed and published by Atari, was a critical and commercial failure. Having bought the home video rights to the game, Atari promoted the release of the 2600 version of the game with an enormous marketing campaign. In the eyes of the public, the combination of the world's most popular home video game console with the world's most popular arcade game seemed like a "can't miss" blockbuster. However, the actual Atari 2600 adaptation of the game ended up being panned by critics as stiff and lifeless, somehow managing to remove the colorful, "fun" aspect of Pac-Man from the game. It was one of two major home video game releases (along with the Atari 2600 version of E.T.) that may have triggered the video game crash of 1983.
Background
Reports have it that the miserable port of the game to the 2600 was largely due to an overzealous Atari marketing department. As Atari planned for the development of Pac-Man for the 2600, some marketing executives approached one of their principal game programmers, Tod Frye, about doing a version of the game. He said he already had a prototype developed and showed it to them. It lacked polish, but the executives were so eager to start selling the game (due in part to the approaching 1981 Christmas season) that they overlooked its flaws and ordered production of the game based on the unfinished prototype. Atari allegedly paid Frye $1 million for his work, which today is equated to about $2.23 million.
Despite the game's being bundled with several A2600 consoles, the public did not overlook its blemishes, and many consumers instead purchased similar offerings from competing video game publishers. The sales figures would normally have been respectable (seven out of every ten of the ten million user base bought the game), except that Atari produced twelve million cartridges, hoping that Pac-Man would sell many more consoles than it did. This led to a large loss for the company.
Graphics
The game suffers from poor design choices as well as limitations of the hardware (especially the Television Interface Adapter). The game only draws one enemy on the screen at a time, so that each of the game's four enemies only appears in one of every four frames; due to persistence of vision this presents the illusion of having four enemies on the screen at once, but they flicker badly. For this reason, the game's instruction manual calls the enemies "ghosts" instead of "monsters". The ghosts are very subtly tinted different colors, but this can be very hard to see on most television sets. Unlike the arcade game in which the monsters' eyes indicate their direction of movement, the eyes of this version's ghosts spin constantly.
Pac-Man himself has been likened to a wrench with an eye, and his mouth continues to open and close even when he is not moving, and he moves up and down corridors sideways. The dots become dashes. The "fruit" has become a two-color rectangle which does not change from board to board.
Sound
The sound of eating the dots is a harsh tone, unlike the "waaka waaka" sound of the arcade. It is interesting to note that, despite its perceived inferiority, sound effects from the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man are possibly the sounds most often used as stock sound effects in film and television to represent the sounds of a game being played in the background of a scene. This has continued for years after the crash of 1983, and despite the fact that the game shown in any given TV or movie scene is usually a completely different video game, and often (especially in recent years) not even being played on an Atari 2600; the sounds have even been used to represent background noise from arcade machines. Some other video games use the same sound effects, such as 2004's , as the "death" sound effect (the sound played when a "life" is lost in the game) is used as part of Lord Crump's theme. Use has continued as recently as the summer of 2006, with the same "death" sound effect being used in a Taco Bell ad for its Spicy Chicken Crunchwrap Supreme.Gameplay
The maze is very dissimilar to the original arcade game in structure (the escape tunnels are located at the top and bottom of the screen) and in color (this version has orange walls and a blue background).
Apart from colour, there are no differences between the ghosts. They move according to much simpler patterns which do not appear to depend on the location of Pac-Man.
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