The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
A recent Retronauts episode looked back upon the history of Buckner and Garcia’s 45-year-old video game novelty song Pac-Man Fever. Host Drew Mackie also runs Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and it just as recently linked in passing a pair of ancient websites devoted to its album, Lee Seitz’s Pac-Man Fever Forever and 52 Weeks of Pac-Man Fever.
We here at Set Side B do everything we can to encourage the kind of unhealthy obsession with video game ephemera that is epitomized by these sites. And carrying a torch for a novelty song dating back to the height of the arcade era, that sounds even crazier (“It’s drivin’ me cray-zee!”) than my own obsession with Rampart.
Started in 1994, when readers would have had to browse the page in Mosaic, the length of the site Pac-Man Fever Forever’s legacy now begins to rival that of the song itself. Like all good websites it refers to other pages on this Widest of World Webs, but alas most, if not all, of the sites it refers and links to are defunct now, saddest being that of the song’s creators, Buckner and Garcia themselves.
As countless kids on social media remind me nearly every minute, I am old, and yet I still dimly remember 1981, the year of Pac-Man’s release, which now might as well be the Stone Age. Social Media, the Web, the public Internet and, I seem to remember, electricity didn’t exist back then. But people still listen to Pac-Man Fever, and they still play Pac-Man today, and Bandai-Namco continues to squeeze the hungry lemon-wedge for every final drop of its juice. I maintain that Bally-Midway, R.I.P., was at least as responsible for its worldwide success as Namco was, and it would have been them who’d have sub-licensed the game’s sounds for a novelty song, as they would have for the Pac-Man Saturday morning cartoon show, a whole landfill of tatty merch, and most of the other instances of Pac-mania from the classic age of arcades. (But not Pac-Mania: Atari published that in the US)
We know Gary Garcia has since passed away. Jerry Buckner (IMDB) continues to roam the neon-blue tunnels of the Earth, and he wrote a song for Wreck-In Ralph. We here hope he continues giving breath as long as he wants. Thanks for the tunes, and to Lee Seitz, thanks for remembering them.
