Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus modified the original Pac maze, added new bonus items, new ghost behaviors, and a few other surprises. Released only one month after the release of Ms. This upgrade kit was also a response to the numerous bootlegs, illegally produced, and “gray market” upgrade kits for Pac-Man that had flooded the coin-op arcade marketplace in the USA by 1982. Pac-Man Plus was an attempt to bring quarters back to the original Pac-Manmachines after the successful release of Ms. First was a conversion kit (or upgrade) of the original Pac-Man titled Pac-Man Plus. ![]() Pac-Man, or just a capitalistic desire to keep those pixel money presses pumping out quarters, Bally-Midway continued to make sequels and spin-offs to Namco’s Pac-Man for the North American market without direct permission (or little involvement) from Namco. Other articles have stated that Bally-Midway somewhat strongarmed Namco into approving the game, and Namco was reluctant until it was clear soon after production that the game would be another smash hit (which Namco of course, got a large share of the royalties from). The game was developed without Namco's approval, but depending on different reports it seems at some point Namco president Masaya Nakamura was possibly brought in to approve the project development. Due to this legal action, GCC had to present the kit to Bally-Midway for approval, which Bally-Midway in turn bought the rights to using it as a base for a Pac-Man sequel. GCC had developed a similar kit for Atari’s Missile Command arcade machine, which ended up getting the company into a bit of legal hot water with Atari. The kit would change Pac-Man (using new ROM chips and an add on daughter card to the original PCB) into a slightly new version of the game called Crazy Otto. These conversion kits are sold under the idea that a game starts to lose value as players grow bored with the game and seek out newer video game challenges. This is the story of Namco’s Super Pac-Man, and why it perhaps never really got the success in the marketplace it deserved. With this greed the true sequel to Pac-Man developed by the originator Namco would get lost in a shuffle of market saturation, pop culture burnout, and poor-quality side projects. ![]() However Bally-Midway would be very greedy for those quarters and wanted more of them. On the shores of the USA, Pac-Man not only made the original owners of Pac-Man very rich (Namco), but also the company (Bally-Midway) who was lucky enough to gain the license to Pac-Man. He was called Pac-Man and the people of the world knew his name well. Not only did they just love the yellow circle, but they also fed him billions of quarters for many years and in turn made many other people very rich. All these things were good but best of all, there was a yellow circle chased by ghosts who ate a lot of things and people loved him. You know, without actually needing any quarters.Once upon a time, there was an era filled with kids wearing plastic Swatch watches, breakdancing in the streets, and eating popcorn to Steven Spielberg movies. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. ![]() We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. ![]() Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. To play the game, go to during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds. Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun. One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets and-of course-free games! When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician.
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