The Game That Nearly ENDED Gaming- The Story Of Pac Man On Atari
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2021
- Video games have been a staple of entertainment for decades. With amazing such as Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Pokémon, and many others, it's no wonder why gaming has become a staple in entertainment. However, gaming almost ended with the Video Game Crash. There are many reasons as to why the video game market almost ended. But a popular example used in Pac Man on the Atari.
I never experienced the disappointment of playing the Atari Pac Man myself as I did not exist in the 80s. My Godfather DID however and he is here to describe what his experience with the game was like. - Ігри
I've seen some comments saying "I though E.T was the game that nearly ended gaming" .
Both Pac-Man and E.T contributed to the video game crash.
That's true
I received an Atarti 2600 for hristmas when I was little and one of the titles we had was Pac-Man. Yeah it was not grrat and my sister figured out a way to play without dying once.
False. The crash was already well on its way.
@@shawncarter7188 Agreed! Pac-Man was a devastating blow to Atari. People stopped buying games blindly - especially Atari branded games. I gravitated towards Activision games, because I knew I'd get my money's worth. Activision games actually looked like something, where Atari branded games were so basic and blocky. Parker games were excellent also.
Pac-Man snapped a winning streak for Atari, in the form of Space Invaders, Missile Command and Asteroids. Throw in Super Breakout too! Anyway, Pac-Man made it crystal clear that the VCS (2600) was antiquated!
The Crash hit in the Spring of 1984, not '83.
“Soon as I eat a power block, the American gaming console industry is finished!”
I also remember an Atari Pac-Man ad that not only used Pac-Man Fever as the song, but played the arcade version's sound effects over the Atari 2600 gameplay
advertising at its finest
@@stoopidmansidiot Yes.
*False Advertising*
Should false advertising be included when it comes to determining the quality of something?
Truth or Square was horrible but even worse considering the false advertising to naive kids like me at the time.
@@Demeech prolly sounds like a good idea
don't really know anything about the advertising for truth or square (mostly because I was very young and not into spongebob when it came out)
As a 6 yo kid who never had a home console until the early 80s, we got this game with our 2600 on Christmas Eve. I knew it wasn't like the arcade, but we loved it. When I woke up Christmas morning, my parents were still playing it from the night before. We also had Space Invaders, so it all worked out for everyone.
Atari Pac Man actually plays really well, I love it.
The ghosts kind of hurt my eyes.
Classic and nostalgia...I still play it
As bad as it looked it was still huge on the 2600 and people played it for days. No one expected it to ok like the arcade as nothing did back then. Best take I’ve seen is they should’ve included PAC-MAN with the 5200. It would’ve taken over if they had. The 5200 version was spot on.
Yeah, or even retire the 2600. But despite problems with the 5200 controllers (which I hadn't heard at the time) almost every game that was available for it was also released for the 2600. They're were 10 million Ataris and Sears Video Arcades when Pac-Man was released, and they got another 2-5 million consoles sold by the end of the year, but at the expense of Atari computers and the 5200. Short-term versus long-term thinking.
As a 7yr old kid in the early 80s that had lots of friends into video games at the time, I can safely say that no bad video game could ever END all gaming as the klick baity title suggests. We absolutely loved video games, spent tons of quarters in the arcades and got to hang out there or on the home consoles. Every video game was like magic to a kid!
This is equivalent to saying a bad cell phone app would END all apps or a bad Website would END all websites.
Rather than nearly ending GAMING as a whole, it would probably be more appropriate to say it nearly ended HOME GAMING. Especially given Pac-Man and E.T. didn't exist in a vacuum, there was a lot of trash on the 2600.
Yeah this guy is obviously young. I was born in 92' and I'm able to put myself in the shoes of someone in the 80s, and of course it's not exactly like the arcade but I'm sure for the time in the early 80s, It a great port for being able to play pacman at home.
As a kid, I never knew the gaming market was crashing, I enjoyed ET (one of my favorites), and the only part of Pac-Man that bothered me was how his mouth didn't "open right."
Same!
It really wasn't crashing in Spring 1982. ColecoVision and 5200 were soon coming out, as well as the prices in the home computer market were dropping. However, for the second year Atari had competition in games, and some of the best (or at least in the case of Donkey Kong, most-desired) games were sold by Activision, Imagic, Parker Bros. and Coleco. Besides Pac-Man, Atari offered Berzerk, Defender and Yars' Revenge (all 1-3 million-copy sellers). If they expected their other games to sell just because they said "Atari" they were mistaken. They'd driven most of their 2600 programmers to other companies or careers.
But somehow because Atari downgraded their estimates of increased profitability from 50% increase to 15% increase, this somehow caused a panic in the investor market, so by the summer consumer electronics show of 1983, people with money wanted out.
That and the ghosts were all the same color & pretty much behaved the same way. The arcade version had different strategies for each of the 4 different colored ghosts
E.T. actually was as fascinating as it was frustrating. Trying to beat the clock in finding and assembling the phone offered a unique arcade-style challenge. That said, Spielberg is a complete globalist lackey.
As someone who lives in New Mexico it’s no wonder why I see this game frequently at the local retro game store
I’m pretty sure the copies just keep wandering away from the landfill
This wasn’t too bad. I remember playing Pac-Man on a floppy disc on an old Epson computer in the 80s and it was very herky-jerky.
But hey, I could play Pac-Man in my own home!!!
When I played this, I was in 2nd grade. I was never given a quarter to play Pac-Man in the arcade, that was for the older kids. So this was a big deal to me, to be allowed to play. I'm pretty sure I didn't even notice the difference
Back when I was a kid I hated this game. The flickering of the ghosts not to mention it being so hard to tell when they were blue.
You played Leapster until you were 10?
I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE! I'm not kidding, my first ACTUAL console was the PS4. I had to play at friends' houses, at the gym's kid's club, and at the dentist office to play video games before I got my own systems.
I had the Leapster, Leap Pad (it was a interactive book not a tablet) and later the V-Smile. I'm honestly glad my mom didn't let me get a game system until 2009 with the Nintendo DS being my first console.
Funny. For me, it *started* gaming. I didn’t know the arcade original. I liked the warm yellow/brown/blue and the tak-tak-tak… it wasn’t exactly a showcase of what the VCS could do but it got me hooked!
The reason for the blue background in both Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for the Atari is this: the Atari executives were VERY INSISTENT in showcasing their console's color capabilities. Thus, with the exception of space shooters like Asteroids and Missile Command, nearly all Atari games had backgrounds other than black... including both of the "Pac" games. Nearly the only Atari games that had black backgrounds were space shooters. There were some exceptions, including:
Haunted House
Donkey Kong
Video Pinball
Berzerk (no, that's not a misspelling; the game was spelled like that, both in the arcades and on the Atari)
Centipede
Millipede
Atari 2600/VCS Pac Man was the victim of memory limitations and programming deadlines. It’s amazing we got a playable game AT ALL in 1982. It was all we had at the time, and I enjoyed playing it. As time went on, we got the far-superior 2600 Ms. Pac Man. The 400/800 version had lousy ghost AI. This was corrected on the 5200 - but you needed an aftermarket controller to play it! The 4K and 8K remakes of VCS Pac Man show what the machine was really capable of.
VCS Pac Man didn’t end gaming. Not even close. Atari manufactured more Pac Man cartridges than they had installed users. THAT cost them a huge loss. ET caused another great loss, but because Atari overpaid for the license, and (again) rushed the game into production. The video game industry pre-crash (‘83) created a “perfect storm”. And Atari was far from the only culprit - for every classic Activision and Imagic game that was published, we also got SHOVELWARE from companies like Games by Apollo, and CRIPPLEWARE from companies like Coleco.
Hey - I’m still classic-gaming forty-plus years later. Atari had hits and misses for sure, but everything improved incrementally even through the so-called “crash”.
If Pac-Man and E.T. had completely ended the home video game industry, then I think that the arcades in the West would be thriving to this day. This is because the Video Game Crash of 1983 nearly did in the HOME game console industry; yet it did not at all affect the arcades.
Taxes on coin operated machines forced many arcades to close
The home brew redemptions of Pac-Man and other arcade conversions like Donkey Kong are fantastic.
Incredible, considering it was developed for the same console.
Shows all too well how Atari took their fanbase for granted and went for the money grab with a cheap clone that's hardly worthy of the Pac-Man name.
Infuriates me to this day.
@@rondadams I remember reading that the entire game was written and debugged by one person in less than a month. Hope he/she got a raise.
Ok for reel
Small: mini meech
Regular: meech
Large: mega meech
Those ghosts flickering kill my eyes!
Glad I'm not the only one.
Excellent video. Subscribed.
That cartridge was passed out with the majority of the systems is probably the biggest reason the entire recesses of the u.s. had no less then 25 of that game every square mile of every town.
It sold really well and was an enjoyable game despite its flaws. In no way did it nearly end gaming.
It sold 8 million copies, not counting maybe 1 million or 2 million in 1983 that were bundled with the 2600. Everyone who had Pac-Man fever wanted to play a Pac-Man game, whether K.C. Munchkin for Odyssey², or the Coleco hand-held arcade, or any eat-dots-in-maze-chase clone for the 2600 like Lock 'N' Chase, Alien, Mouse Trap, etc.
However, it was the first disappointment to some Atari game-buyers. Many Atari programmers had been driven out, and consumers were about to learn that just because it said "Atari" didn't mean it would be a quality game. And 1982 was the year of 3rd-party hits for Atari with cartridge sales exceeding a million from Activision including Pitfall! (4M), Parker Bros. including Frogger (4M), Imagic including Demon Attack (2M), and Coleco's Donkey Kong (4M).
Japan and Europe cared little about the crash and it is likely that even without it the market would have shifted to the east as the 5200 and 7600 didn't really have much good stuff to compete with what the NES had to offer.
I was wondering why when I heard that they were still buying games (along with Brazil). I think in America it was partly investor lack of confidence starting 4th quarter 1982, partly retailers who didn't know what they were stocking, and partly consumers 3rd strike in low quality games with Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as well as them moving from consoles to home computers.
Gotta love the Tech Demo turned Game.
Mario's Tennis on the Virtual Boy is another great example.
You are right. I'm watching this on my xbox/TV, so yea, not only can my device I'm watching on play pac man, but I own the original and ms Pacman for it
Mega meech saying keep calm and da da on is so wholesome
I mean he’s lying to your face, I don’t see how that’s wholesome.
Infuriates me to this day.
Atari took their fanbase for granted and went for the money grab with a cheap clone that's hardly worthy of the Pac-Man name.
Reminds me of the scene from Elf with the book and the missing pages. I can imagine some execs at Atari back in the day doing something similar, and saying "they're just kids, they won't care, and besides we'll have their money in hand and they can't do anything about it.".
I couldn't stand it. It's not like I didn't have fair warning because it was being promoted on multiple screens at Pacific Stereo, with customers playing it. Atari 2600 Pac-Man was the reason I switched to the Atari 800 computer, where the version of Pac-Man was very decent. Centipede too.
I don't think this is a bad game at all...seriously virtually no one at the time expected it to be like the arcade (which came out a full three years after the 2600 itself came out) and it works basically like Pac-Man doesn't it?
My dad got this game when he was a kid. He was 9 and he said this was the most disappointing thing ever to him at the time. He couldn't play for more than 20 minutes because the sound effects gave him a headache.
I felt the pain when Mega Meech was describing his experince with the game.
I was in the same category as your Dad.
Yeah, I waited in line for 2.5 hours the day this came out to get it at a Caldor store. heh Definitely a bit disappointing, but I still played the hell out of it and even got blisters on my hand from doing so. Hey... it was what we had at the time. lol Ms. Pac-Man is soooo much better for the system... and the Pac-Man Jr. game looks great, but I never actually played it.
The Odyssey II had K.C. Munchkin, which actually predates the Atari Pac-Man by about a year and it is a FAR better game. I so wished that one was available on the Atari too. :-)
"This game ain't right, I tell you what"...
According to some sources, E.T. has been made in 6 WEEKS in order to meet the holiday deadline.
E.T. ended ATARI!
The TIME OUT arcades in every Mall.
There was the Coleco handheld Pac Man that the first Atari looks like.
The first version sounds more like Pitfall Harry.
My friend Matt and I had 4 game cartridges for Commodore 64 that both of us liked best
Pac Man
Q-bert
Missle Command
Jupiter Lander
We wrote our own video games in BASIC programming languages, using hplots, and rnd commands for plotting graphic pixels. Peeks and pokes. If the and goto loops. 1984.
The concept of "gaming" didn't exist back in 1982, and Atari really cleaned up with their watered-down version of the arcade classic. What happened later was inevitable, regardless of how good this game may have been.
Pac-Man fever meant people would play anything like Pac-Man regardless of quality in 1981-2. Starting with the low-quality Coleco hand-held Arcade (which you couldn't turn the sound off?!). People with Odyssey² bought K.C. Munchkin which does not compare favorably to Atari 2600 Pac-Man, though they enjoyed it. Then there were also those dots-in-maze chase games like Alien and Mouse Trap for the 2600 and Lock 'N' Chase for both the 2600 and Intellivision. A game that sold 8 million copies and helped sell 2-5 million 2600 consoles in 1982 has to be a success. Even if they manufactured 2 million extras (which is not confirmed), they did bundle 1-2 million Pac-Man carts along with Combat with the 2600 in 1983.
At worst it was the first major disappointment for Atari consumers who didn't think the look, sound and gameplay were faithful enough.
You mean nearly ended gaming in north america. Europes gaming scene was booming in the 80s.
I think they weren't competing with home computers in 1983. Also, probably only the best-selling titles were converted to PAL and sent to Europe.
you guys EVER see FIREFLY or SORCERER its sooooo BAD makes ET , Pacman and DK, DK jr look like a masterpiece
It's very tempting to try and simplify what happened. But Bushnell wanted a followup to the 2600 pretty soon after it was launched. Warner didn't want to know and milked that old hardware way beyond its natural life. So the seeds of doom were sown pretty early and the crash in the US was really the natural outcome of old hardware, poor management decisions and poor 3rd party rip off games. 2600 Pacman sold a bucketload but it was the first game that really exposed the limitations of the hardware because its high level of presentation (for the time) in the arcade, its mainstream appeal and the marketing hype meant that it was under more scrutiny by more people than games had before. Silly decisions like not allowing a black background and restricting the cart size which prevented the developer from making the flicker less severe, only added to the problem. As a game itself , it's all right. It even has a 2 player mode and if its graphical limitations are addressed (which could have been done by what I mentioned earlier) , it remains playable. But with Ms Pacman and Jr Pacman on the 2600 , why would you?
The third-party rip-offs hurt retailers who didn't know what they were doing by stocking games from fly-by-night companies that consumers didn't want. Of course there were some Atari games that consumers didn't want too. It's hard to say that a game that sold 8 million and perhaps had another million or two bundled with the 2600 in 1983 was a failure. It might have been a disappointment to some in retrospect, after the Pac-Man fever went down.
But considering people who owned an Atari console bought 4 million Donkey Kong, 4 million Pitfall, 4 million Frogger, 2 million Demon Attack, plus 1 million of several Activision games, those were purchases that didn't give money to Atari, reducing their profitability and scaring the industry.
For some reason, many games on the Atari 2600 (originally known as the Atari VCS (Not related to the newly released Atari VCS)) were rushed such as games like E.T.
This is BS. We knew what the port was going to look like before we got it, we played it, we loved it. We had high scores that friends would try to beat. It was a little bit easier than the arcade game so we could play it longer at home. It was great. Atari itself was already low-res, and we never expected more from it than we got. ❤
Also E.T. was not a terrible game either, it was just more complex than most Atari games and therefore difficult to figure out at first. 😅
I don't remember ever wanting to take a game back to the store that was really bad when I was a kid. I didn't really like Canyon Bomber or Star Raiders, but didn't ask for replacements. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was taken back to the store in droves. Maybe if they had fixed the pits so kids could get out of them, without falling back in? Or if had been a bicycle chase game, or as Steven Spielberg suggested: another Pac-Man knockoff?
Some people were taking games back to Zayre's in 1983 as they had a bin of opened 3rd-party games like from Imagic that were taped back up. Were they bad, or were kids "renting" the games, playing them for a month and exchanging them?
As an adult there was one SNES game where you had to swing a mace to conquer a territory that I took back because it was unwinnable and unplayable. So much for Nintendo seal of quality assurance.
I am glad to hear someone that knows what they are talking about . Pac man could have been better but it still is a decent game. Later Pac man games had memory added to the cart. ET was actually a very good game. You needed to read the instructions to truly learn how to play it. So many people said they could not get out of the pits and all they had to do was once in the pit move over to the far right or left then go up and keep your fit stick to the right or left as you go up and he will come out first try. Read the instructions!!!
@@janwilt6974 Reading the manual wasn't the only problem. I read there's a later home version that fixed the bad pixel test that made your character fall back in.
There are far superior homebrew versions of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. One is 4 kb, and is missing the title screen and the between round intermissions, but otherwise is a great port. There is also a 8 kb port which has those missing features, but the "tunnel" was moved from the sides to the top and bottom.
What is the song starting at 8:57?
Creepy Catacombs: Pac Man World
Not a single game caused the crash, but over saturation of shovelware burned the consumer the wrong way and people were tired of it. Pacman and E.T. on the Atari 2600 had it's hand in it as well, but wasn't the single reason. Too much pacman clones, pong consoles and nothing ground break or exciting. Consumers were done, until Nintendo came in the US in 1985 and shown consumers what they needed, something ground breaking and different.
I think investors bailed first, then retailers found they had games that didn't sell. Finally consumers realized they'd been buying games sight-unseen with the hopes they were good. For the 2600 Pac-Man sold 8 million, Donkey Kong 4 million+, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 2 million+ (before or after returns were considered?) and all were desired but disappointing in some way. I can't see how lame games hardly anyone bought upset consumers.
Price may have been an issue. With Atari carts selling for $10, why would I pay $30 for a new game in 1984?
The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man felt more like an inferior bootleg low-budget fan game than a true port of the arcade original.
You gotta get your facts straight...it wasn't atari pacman...it was ET
Jr Pac Man has one more port then you mentioned with portotypes on the Atari 5200 and the Atari 8-bit family as well as ports for DOS, C64, and as a easter egg in the Mega Drive version of Pac man 2 with that just being a reskin of the Ms. Pac Man easter egg found in the SNES version
Less go!
Pac Man and E.T aren't bad at all, and it wasn't just them that caused the crash. games like the Earthworld series and Karate should get the hate that the two that get blasted by people do
It was Atari's best selling game ever with 8 million copies and held the record for best selling console game for years. Total failure
Take a look at youtube to:
Pac Man 4K
It's a new and better Version for Atari 2600
I’m at Disney Springs right next to the Disney Quest Show Building that turned into the awful NBA Experience and now it’s gone just as I predicted
I thought that was ET?
Me too
That too
No. Shovelware killed the industry
So Mega Meech is your dad?
Pactholocism! 😂😂😂
atari pacman plays really well only people with no opinion talk s*&#^ about this game
Damn, I never realised how terrible Pacman 2600 was.
I want to see a jr pacman Game to be Re-realese
I mean his parents got the most of The Ports in Console's,Arcades,phones and etc
But junior Dosent get anything
What namco Has the rights to Re-realese Ms pac-man But not His Son
Even when JR pacman had a change
Which is Just hat & name Change we could have The Re-realese
Man Atari is the only Company to care about junior And not namco
I’ve heard that Atari’s policy was to use black backgrounds only for space themed games like space invaders, asteroids, etc. Therefore they used blue for pac man.
That's a myth
@@looneyburgmusic A myth that seemingly came straight from Tod Frye, who coded Pac-Man for the 2600. Berzerk and Haunted House both released in the same year as Pac-Man and had black backgrounds while not being space-themed games, while Vanguard - released in 1981 - _was_ a space game and didn't have a black background. He said this was a guideline - not a strict rule, but a heavy suggestion - to avoid black backgrounds in games, and that management felt space games made more sense to have a black background over anything else. I can't find anything to confirm or deny the authenticity of this claim, however.
I can't find any official statement, but the most plausible reason I can find for why quite a few games that had black backgrounds in the arcade but didn't in their 2600 ports is due to the number of people who owned color TVs. When the 2600 released in 1977, about 1/4 of homes in the United States with a television were still black & white - this is millions of homes with TVs that don't produce color images. By 1982, however, when Pac-Man was released, there were significantly less households without a color TV set, and management wanted games to appear flashier by having more color to them. In most cases, I would say this is completely asinine for management to suggest, but with how absolutely out of touch management at Atari was at this time, based on reports of _many_ of the people who worked for Atari in the late 70s/early 80s, I could definitely see this being plausible.
Have to love how people who weren't even alive when Pac-Man was released for the 2600 think they know the story of Pac-Man for the 2600.
(hint): Millions and millions of children loved the game, and played it endlessly
Exactly. This is basically revisionist history and we need less videos like this.
I was like 5 when we got this, and it was one of my favorite Atari games. I played E.T. alot, too. Back then, you played what you had, and couldn't be too picky.
So glad I grew up in the NES Era lol
I’m so glad I grew up in the Atari era and know that videos like this are clickbait bs. 😅
In 1983. Pac Man Atari edition helped cause a gaming market crash.
Today I ran Pac Man Championship Edition DX whatever. caused my PC to lock up and crash.
Pretty sure Pac-Man is cursed.
somehow completely forgot that this game is literal trash when I first found this video
Looks like we have too many old school retro gamers in the comments section, who believe that their opinions are the only ones that matter. Well, guess what? This game was CRAP. It doesn’t matter how many copies were sold, or how “great”, you may think it is. It’s nothing more than sugar coated crap. This barely resembled Pac-Man. Thanks to Atari’s greed, it was rushed out the door for extra sales, and it shows. Quantity over quality. Not the worst game on the console, but it contributed to the crash. Get over yourselves.
Your mom sounds like my mom.
There several points here 1 MONEY how much can WE make PASSABLE for MONEY 2 SHOVELWARE i believe it was a PROTOTYPE and shoveled out 3 LIMITATIONS/TIME w a 4k game how much can be done 4k and a time limit to shovel it out to make ...MONEY
Shiitty Pac man launched the 520p. Tbey knew.
Did Mickey Mouse narrate this video?
This was the first port of pacman to the arcades to console's so back then i well understand why it was so bad
Yes, that's why Mega Meech is here. I'd be much more forgiving.
I had the same experience with Atari Pacman. I was soooo excited to get it. And then the mega letdown. It was and is awful.
I thought it was ET for the Atari
Same
That too
As a gameplayer who was actually alive when these games were new...none of us had a problem with pac-man for the 2600. I keep seeing youtubers crapping on this game. You are talking out your ass.
Nintendo safe the day
They actually did.
It baffles me that they rushed development on something like this, such a high distribution cost and they skimped on development?
Oh yeah, and the background is blue because they told the programmer "Only our space games can use a black background"
Atari flopped so Nintendo and Sega could run.
At least the virtual boy didn’t do this 🤷♂️
No, the VB just outright flopped dead out of the gate.
All the hate and blame Atari 2600 Pac-Man gets is unfounded. If that's the case then how do you explain Ms. Pac-Man? The crash was due to people moving to home computers to play games and lack of innovation in newer consoles.
No wonder why Atari was a complete laughing stock in the 1980s.
this game is worse than et.
Trying to shove it out for Christmas…
SMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART!
Yeah, you clearly don't remember 1983, because the market didn't crash that year. It was 1984 when the market saw a major decline dropping by more than half of 1983. Stop using Wikipedia for all your research, and do some yourself, you'll see 1984 saw a major, major drop in video game sales over 1983 than 1983 saw from 1982.
Lets all blame Pacman and ET for the crash utter Bo....cks. The Industry crashed because of the swamping of the market at the time by third company developers and not the two fore mentioned game. First of Pacman sold 7 million copies there biggest game ever. At the time games were in there infancy personally I think its is a good effort telll me another game that sells 7 million copies today
A lot of revisionist bullshit regarding this game. It was not the cause of the video game crash and neither was E.T. The game was not too bad considering most VCS users expected games that would be graphically and sonically inferior to their arcade counterparts. The dedicated videogame consoles faced increased competition from cheaper and superior home computer software which contributed to the death of the consoles. To blame E.T and PacMan is to over simplify the situation. Lots of 3rd party cartridge manufacturers jumped on the Atari bandwagon and produced absolute shit that was far worse than either PacMan or E.T.