What I remember doing is working hard on a post proclaiming to the world the existence of a weird offshoot of the Pac-Man universe called Packri Monster. I wrote it, and I saved it (I believe) so it would be posted on the morning of January 16th.

Well, I just had a look and instead of the post I thought I had scheduled, there was just an empty shell, a title to an empty page. Even the name “Packri Monster” was misspelled. How embarrassing!

But what’s even more embarrassing is that I found out what I had written before had a notable factual inaccuracy, so I’m kind of glad it didn’t get out in that form.

Let’s remedy all of these things right now.

The Backstory & Coleco Pac-Man

Namco made the original Puck-Man, in Japan. Bally-Midway licensed it, changed the name to Pac-Man to avoid people messing with the P in the title, and that was when Pac-Man became a worldwide mega-hit. At the time game rights tended to get portioned off separately to consoles, home computers and dedicated handhelds. While (in)famously Atari locked up the console and (through Atarisoft) home computer rights to Pac-Man, the handheld rights went out to a variety of places.

Notably Coleco made (relatively speaking) a respectable tabletop version of Pac-Man, doing the best they could with its discrete graphic elements. You can play a recreation of that here. (Note: use WASD to control the game, the arrow keys are for Player 2.)

Coleco Pac-Man is interesting as a game in itself. Its box confidently asserts that it “sounds and scores” like the arcade game, of which I assure you neither is true. Its background noise is an annoying drone; while it usually takes two boards to reach 10,000 points in the arcade and earn the sole extra life, it took me five on my test play of Coleco Pac-Man. Even so, it’s the best handheld or tabletop version of Pac-Man from the time.

Because all of the LED graphic elements of Coleco Pac-Man’s are discrete, pre-made images, they had to take certain liberties with the in-game art. Pac-Man is drawn permanently facing left; alternate spaces on the board depict him with mouth open and closed. The dot image is repurposed as one of the ghosts’ eyes. Energizers are red, so when a ghost passes by one of those spaces one of its eyes, too, turns red. Ghosts don’t show up in different colors to identify their personalities. Each contains a Pac-Man graphic themselves, which isn’t illuminated when they are vulnerable. All of these elements are repeated throughout the board, visible dimly when inactive, and lit brightly when intended to be used as a game element.

I maintain that Coleco tabletop Pac-Man is playable. The simulation linked above has a flaw, you can’t hold down a direction to take a corner early like you could in the arcade, you have to press a key at the moment you sail past an intersection if you want to take it. But even in this form, it’s arguably a better game, in playability, than Atari 2600 Pac-Man. It sold 1.5 million units after all, despite coming out after.

It was a time when it wasn’t uncommon for companies to make ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that could play one or more games, which they would license to other companies. General Instruments made a number of these for dedicated consoles (here’s a catalog of their products), playing a number of games, including Pong and Tank clones.

One such ASIC was made by Bandai, the same company that decades later would merge with Pac-Man creator Namco itself. It was made for a handheld that Bandai themselves would produce called Packri Monster.

Packri Monster as a Game

It’s an interesting little machine. Like Coleco Pac-Man, it uses discrete images for its graphics, which have to be mixed together in various ways to satisfy all of its play requirements.

GenXGrownUp posted a video on Youtube running down both the unit and the game (16 minutes):

Note the yellow letters on the package: PACK MAN. It’s obviously intended to be a fly-by-night knockoff, from the very company that would later merge with Pac-Man’s creator!

Differences are many. The maze is much smaller, the ghosts (“Bogeys”) are limited in number to three, and there’s only two “power foods,” in the upper corners of the maze.

The lack of one entire ghost makes sense, given the smaller size of the game. But it turns out there’s another knockoff of Pac-Man, with an even smaller maze, and a bizarre limitation. It’s the game I had originally mistaken for Packri Monster, and I wish I knew more about this variant, because it’s fairly widespread.

Mystery Handheld Pac-Man Variant #3

This version is probably best known as the basis of Tomy’s handheld Pac-Man game, in the appealing yellow case.

A simulation of Tomy Pac-Man is playable in MAME, and additionally can be found on the Internet Archive in playable form. It’s a simpler game than the Coleco version, and like Packri Monster tops out at three ghosts, starting at level four.

Especially notable about this version is its extraordinary difficulty, and dare I say, unfairness. There’s only 34 discrete places in the maze that Pac-Man can even be at, and two, later on three, of those places are going to contain ghosts at a time. From two to four locations can be threatened (“in check”) by the ghosts at any moment, for unlike arcade Pac-Man, these ghosts are more prone to reversing direction whenever they want. At the start of a board ghosts are prone to behaving randomly, so you can’t even devise patterns to ensure your safety. The Energizers become essential tools for survival, and expire rapidly, so you’re unlikely to ever eat more than two ghosts with one.

This is the only version of 80s handheld Pac-Man that I know of that has fruit. Graphic limitations mean that it’s always going to be cherries, but the points advance to 400 pts. per fruit on level four, where it becomes an essential component of your score. One extra life is awarded at 2,000 points.

But the weirdest thing about this version… since, like in all these versions, Pac-Man is stuck permanently facing left, and the dots are set between Pac-Man locations in this version, the unknown designer of Tomy Pac-Man decided that the player can only eat dots and Energizers when traveling left. The game isn’t about visiting every location in the maze, but visiting every dot when traveling in the right, that is left direction!

So if you’re fleeing from left-to-right, you’ll never eat any dots. It influences your travel significantly, and you’ll unavoidably often have to double back over dots to satisfy Pac-Man’s directional digestion.

When you pass level five, you get told: “good“. I don’t know if any later four-letter message await you. There aren’t enough elements for “wow”.

Like Packri Monster, Tomy version of Pac-Man’s got licensed out, but in an unusual format: at the basis for an LCD watch Pac-Man game from Nelsonic. Sum Square Stories shows off this version here. (8 minutes). There’s some substantial differences: it seems easier, scores much lower, and starts you out against only one ghost. But it retains Tomy Pac-Man’s most distinctive quirk, that eating can only be done when going west.

Why does this version of Pac-Man do that? To make the game harder? I have no clue at all. Can anyone enlighten me as to the reason?

rodneylives

Before Tiger’s line of cheap handheld mechanical electonic games in the 80s and 90s, there were cheap handheld mechanical wide-up games in the 70s and 80s! These are basically forgotten by most people today, but kids of that age might vaguely remember them, made by companies like Tomy.

There used to be more websites dedicated to uncovering and preserving them. One that remains to this day is the Handheld Museum, which has an extensive listing of Tomy’s titles.

Another place you might be able to learn about them, with demonstrations, is Robin’s video on them. (29 minutes)

Robin shows off a variety of them, including a variety of electric (as opposed to electronic) games. Some weren’t even battery powered, instead having to be wound up via a dial on the back, but all but the last of the games in this video run on batteries. One had to be repaired on camera. The first game is the earliest, a solitaire version of poker, dating to 1971; for context, Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was made in 1972.

It just goes to show that personal gaming was something that existed even before video games. It was something in the air at the time, and even if Pong hadn’t happened (or the earlier Computer Space, or the Odyssey, or even prior games made at universities and laboratories), it seems evident that it would have happened shortly anyway. It was an idea that was bound to happen eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.

rodneylives

Mattel made pretty good use of the D&D license. They also released the “Computer Labyrinth Game,” which was a mixture of physical and electronic components. This version is wholly electronic, and has the same kind of feel as a Game & Watch title. It has the old-style of LCD components, black shapes that are faintly visible at all times, but can be made much darker to “display” images.

This 13-minute unboxing and demonstration video is by Youtuber Nerd Mimic. If their gameplay description sounds a bit familiar, it seems that this game is mostly a handheld port of the older (yes, even from that time) computer game Hunt The Wumpus, which is played on what the math people call a graph of nodes. The idea is to use clues given by the game to deduce the location of a monster and to kill it by firing an arrow at it from an adjacent space. Stumbling into the space of the monster or a bottomless pit is lethal, and there are bats wandering around that can drop you into a random space. It’s a classic of early gaming, and a pretty good choice for a pocket-sized version.

Mattel made two console D&D games for the Intellivision, both of them interesting and thought of well today: Cloudy Mountain and Treasure of Tarmin. None of these games made use of the true AD&D ruleset, as it would have been called at the time. They’re original game designs with a vague sort of fantasy theme, but they’re still interesting to play.

rodneylives

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

We’ve been busy here lately, so it’s pretty light this time, just some links left over from last time.

Ash Parrish at The Verge reports on that doorway that was found in Nier Automata: it was a hoax, a mod. The people responsible are quoted as saying, “We have been loving all the discussions and theories — it has been an amazing journey.” Ha ha yes wait you lied to us. Not forgiven. Next!

Kayla Dube at SlashGear writes that the Sega Channel was ahead of its time. Yep, it was.

At Retro Dodo, Brandon Saltalamacchia tells about the OH WOW, a Linux-based gaming handheld from the US, not China, somehow. Power: probably enough to emulate Dreamcast games. Price: Under $200. Date: November 2022.

rodneylives