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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the Blinky,-Inky,-Pinky-and-???? dept.

Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game:

Released in America in October 1980 yet arriving in arcades closer to late November, Pac-Man rolled in like a guest at the wrong address. Since America was right in the middle of “the shooter craze”, when the competitive gaming scene was focused exclusively on mastering difficult multi-buttoned games, Pac-Man’s debut quite literally looked like a birthday party arriving on the front lines of World War III. Aesthetically, it didn’t fit in. Although some people migrated to it quickly, the press paid it little attention until full “Pac-Mania” finally hit in the Summer of 1981, its shift from a fad to a full-blown craze delayed by a historically brutal sub-arctic winter in many parts of America which kept millions of grade school gamers out of the arcades until things warmed up.

[...] If it’s been a while since you played Pac-Man on an original arcade game cabinet, let me refresh your memory:  Put in your quarter, hit the one-player button and grab the joystick. All you have to do is move Pac-Man through a series of tight cornered mazes, trying to eat all the dots and fruit on screen while also trying to out-maneuver a group of ghosts who will kill you as soon as they touch you. If you eat one of the energizer dots, though, you’ll have a short period of gameplay where the ghosts slow down and stop chasing you so you can eat the ghosts and pick up extra points. But something else happens, something I’ve never seen anyone ever mention in any article or video before.  It’s a physical response and it always occurs by the time the player reaches the second screen…

Pac-Man is more of a driving game than a maze game. As you’re playing, you’re jamming that joystick left  and right, up and down, movements that shifts your right shoulder forward and back, rocking your body side to side. When the going gets tough, and the ghosts start closing in, all of this rocking motion compels you to lean into the game and, whether you realize you’re doing it or not, you’re going to grab onto the game.  You actually need to get a grip…on something. You’re either going to lean hard against your left palm as it rests on the control panel which isn’t comfortable for very long or, like most people, you’re going to grab the side of the game and hold on tight.  You have to or you’ll lose your balance. You can’t take the sharp corners smoothly and quickly without doing this, ether. You need the extra stabilization to move Pac-Man around the corners accurately.

It's one of those things that I never thought of before, but seeing it pointed out, it seems obvious in retrospect. (The linked story has a plethora of pics showing the left-hand death grip. Get a load of the fashions back then, too.) I wonder how many other "obvious" things happen each day that I also fail to notice. Also, I rarely got past the second screen; how well could YOU play?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @06:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @06:51PM (#809913)

    This has NOTHING to do with PacMan. Of course the left hand is on the game. All the one-handed games were played that way. You had to put your hand somewhere. Also there is WAY too much written about the body language. If you were slighty-above or above average in height, you needed to lower your head to get a better view onto the screen; you wanted your head to be lower so you weren't looking down on the screen too much. The way to do that, or at least the way I did that, was to take a very wide stance, like one of the guys in the picture. Some of the other guys shown have their legs bent. If it was a game you played alot, or a game that took a while to play, you tended to lean on the box because standing in the same position gets uncomfortable after a while.

    In a noisy arcade, you also tended to put your head closer the screen to better hear your game. That also necessitates holding onto the cabinet for any reasonable amount of time.

    For what it's worth, my game of preference was Defender. There you needed two hands, so I either stood with a wide stance, or I would bend my knees a bit and rest them on the cabinet while leaning back a bit.

    The author should have talked about body language playing pinball. That is where people move about a lot.