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?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
The one memory that stands out, is trying to hoard the quarters that my wife kept begging me for. "I know your pocket is full of quarters, give me some!" as she patted my outer thighs, then pinched the inner thighs. Wicked woman had no shame!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @02:19AM
Meh... I started with Pong at the local Pizza Hut.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:44PM (1 child)
And the only cure is MORE COWBELL!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @01:17AM
Excellent creimer tier humor
(Score: 2, Touché) by The Vocal Minority on Monday March 04 2019, @12:01AM (1 child)
I just wanted to shoot alien bugs.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rivenaleem on Monday March 04 2019, @01:26PM
We have some great opportunities to shoot bugs in the Navy!
Would you like to know more?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 04 2019, @12:07AM (6 children)
On one memorable occasion I managed to get to the third level!
Even better for me was when my cousin showed me best strategy in Space Invaders, and I could regularly get to the fourth level!
Come on now, everybody hum "Pinball Wizard" with me.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 04 2019, @12:42AM (4 children)
I'm only okay at video games but once I get a table down (a couple days monkeying with the same table for the harder ones) I can play pinball until I get tired of playing it off of a single quarter. Well, maybe not a single quarter nowadays because of inflation but you know what I mean.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 04 2019, @12:55AM (3 children)
Yeah, I know what you mean. I suppose it's a dollar now.
The only pinball game I got that good on was the Addams Family game a friend had in his bar in the 1990's.
We actually don't have 25 cent pieces where I live, so it was 20 cents per game. It still seemed like a lot of money in 1980.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 04 2019, @01:32AM (2 children)
I didn't get good at pinball until the 90s and I could drive to the arcade after school and work. Riverboat Gambler was the first one I ever made my bitch I think.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Monday March 04 2019, @03:30AM (1 child)
Mine was Silverball.
We got the timing on that loop in the center down cold (from either side), and would show off hitting the loop and catching the ball with our eyes closed.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 04 2019, @01:03PM
Damn, that's some Tommy-level shit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 04 2019, @04:34AM
I didn't play Pac-Man much because Ms. Pac-Man had appeared by the time I started getting interested in arcade games. I got to the 3rd maze of Ms. Pac-Man, and a few times beat it 3 times, but never could beat it 4 times in a row to make it to the 4th and final maze. The power pills had such a short duration by then that they were not much use. Part of the trouble was I just didn't play enough. Parents were very stingy and frugal, and didn't think video games a good use of the family's hard earned money. Still, I was a natural at Q-Bert. Could play that one for over an hour on one quarter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @12:30AM
Usually would get about twenty keys in, around quarter of a million points. Got a full million once, which must have been about eighty keys. It was a coffee table version, which was fun (and better suited to the restaurant environment).
It's really not that hard of a game, especially compared to today's multiplayer games. You just need to keep a cool head and stay away from the ghosts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 04 2019, @12:37AM
Clyde.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday March 04 2019, @01:33AM
a local pub/barcade has a tabletop multi game machine. No need to hold the side, just lean on the lever!!
Of course, be careful not to spill your beer :-)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday March 04 2019, @01:34AM (2 children)
I had a weekly budget that included video games. My memory is pac man came out a year before Street Fighter (caveat: at my arcade). I remember first playing SF and thinking "yeah, I'm not wasting quarters finding/remembering hidden combinations" Then I saw 2-3 people watching some dude playing SF and wondering WTF? Nobody watched me playing my game.
To this day I don't do chopy socky street fighter clones that require you to discover/remember button combinations.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @05:42AM (1 child)
Pac-man came out in 1980,street fighter (the original with the giant rubber buttons) in 1987, but street fighter 2, the one everybody remembers, was 1991. Really two completely different generations of games.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Wednesday March 06 2019, @01:02AM
Did I mention I'm 60 and this was 40 years ago? Yeah, my bad. I just remember Street Fighter came out of nowhere to take over arcades, not real sure what games I was playing at the time.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by el_oscuro on Monday March 04 2019, @01:51AM (5 children)
... Except I never played Pac-Man. Instead I played Tempest and Asteroids.
At least in the arcade. At home my Dad got a Heathkit computer for his work. I asked him I could play video games on it. He said: "If you program them yourself". So I did. A VT100 terminal with primitive ASCII graphics with a 9600 baud modem and 8080 assembly language. Asteroids or tempest was completely out of the question. But Pac-Man with the only objects moving were the monsters and the player, it was possible.
First challenge was having to keep a separate copy of the level in memory to detect walls and collisions, as the state of the dumb terminal couldn't be accessed by the program. Second challenge was the 9600 speed - it was only fast enough for 2 monsters instead of the usual 4. So I had to make my monsters bad assed. I initially set them to always try to follow you but they became trapped in certain parts of the maze. So I needed a random generator, which my dad helped with, but I coded. Now my monsters could chose a random direction at any intersection, or chose one of the available ones instead of getting trapped. I also slowed the player when eating dots and sped him up when not, just like the arcade game.
The final challenge was control and scoring. Originally, I had it so you would try to turn the direction when the key was pressed. But that would stop you if you weren't quite lined up with the intersections. This was really clunky and affected play - I needed it to work like the arcade one. So I set it to "save" your last keystroke and turn a the first possible chance. That really brought the game play up to arcade standards. But I still needed to work out scoring. Doing decimal arithmetic in 8080 assembly was *hard*. So I did ASCII arithmetic, basically using a process identical to the mechanical counters that 1970's pinball machines used.
And that game worked - those 2 monsters were totally on the players ass.
Oh, and I learned assembly language and other skills which I use today.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pino P on Monday March 04 2019, @01:26PM (4 children)
You were programming a game with multiple enemies on an 8080, whose ISA is largely a refactor of that in Datapoint programmable terminals. The challenges you may have faced resemble challenges faced by modern-day Game Boy homebrew game developers once they realize how weak the 8080's [HL] addressing paradigm is at reading and writing fields of structs [gg8.se]. Did you have any special trick for efficiently accessing numerous properties of a particular enemy? Zilog did add [IX+offset] addressing to its Z80, but Sharp didn't add [IX+offset] to the Game Boy CPU, making it handle more like an 8080 in this respect.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday March 04 2019, @11:51PM (2 children)
Interesting link. I didn't actually use any structs at all and had no special tricks. The screen was 80x25, so x/y and direction for both monsters and player, and last key pressed, all single byte variables.
Plus the score (as actual ASCII digits), and a 2k character array for the playfield.
That is pretty much it.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 05 2019, @06:45PM (1 child)
There are two ways to organize that.
Array of structs is common on machines whose indexed addressing mode is a small constant offset from a big (16-bit or more) variable pointer, such as Z80, 68000, and MIPS. It puts each entity's properties one after another:
X for enemy 1, Y for enemy 1, direction for enemy 1
X for enemy 2, Y for enemy 2, direction for enemy 2
X for enemy 3, Y for enemy 3, direction for enemy 3
...
Structure of arrays is common on machines whose indexed addressing mode is a small (8-bit) variable offset from a large constant address, such as 6502, and in BASIC dialects without structs. It puts each property in a separate array, where the properties of one entity are found at the same index into each array:
X for enemy 1, X for enemy 2, X for enemy 3, ...
Y for enemy 1, Y for enemy 2, Y for enemy 3, ...
direction for enemy 1, direction for enemy 2, direction for enemy 3, ...
Which did you end up using?
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday March 07 2019, @12:56AM
pl_x: db 0 ;Players x position
pl_x: db 0 ;Players y position
pl_dir: db 0 ;Players direction 0-up,1-down,2-left,3-right
m1_x: db 0 ;Monster 1 x position
m1_x: db 0 ;Monster 1 y position
m1_dir: db 0 ;Monster 1 direction 0-up,1-down,2-left,3-right
m2_x: db 0 ;Monster 2 x position
m2_x: db 0 ;Monster 2 y position
m2_dir: db 0 ;Monster 2 direction 0-up,1-down,2-left,3-right
lstkey: db 0 ;Last key pressed
score: db '00000'
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Tuesday March 05 2019, @12:03AM
If you are into old school game development, you might want try fixing the Atari 2600 ET [neocomputer.org] game using the Stella Debugger [github.io].
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday March 04 2019, @02:10AM
People still do that while playing games, watch people play 3d-shooters and watch their head or how they try to peak around corners.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 04 2019, @02:53AM
The _original_ Donkey Kong, none of that newfangled Mario bullshit.
(Hey Kid! Get Off My Lawn!)
I often watched the second best, and I could see what he did to get beyond my own maximum level but he had a special magic that I myself did not possess.
Then:
In my Sophomore Year, our Financial Aid Application inquired "How much do you spend on video games each week?"
Get This:
Our First Best appeared in a Nintendo Commercial! How could could that have been?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 04 2019, @02:55AM (3 children)
FUK
SHT
CNT
TRD
DIK
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @04:36AM (2 children)
Forgot ASS, TIT, CLT, BUM, COK...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @04:45AM (1 child)
POO, FRT, SOB
OK, I'm bored...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @06:00AM
BAA
RAM
EWE
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Monday March 04 2019, @03:28AM
It drew people away from the holy Atari Asteroids machine of awesomeness.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday March 04 2019, @05:43AM (1 child)
https://www.google.com/logos/2010/pacman10-hp.png [google.com]
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday March 04 2019, @05:47AM
That doesn't seem to work. Just google "Pac-Mam"
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday March 04 2019, @09:35AM (2 children)
The early eighties arcade was a magic place. I don't say it with the eye of a kid that sees magic everywhere. Electronic games, pinball, air hockey, minibowling, electro mechanical games, lights and 80s music. I really regret having shot no photos there, it slowly morphed into an uninteresting all-electronics thing.
The arcade had pacman but replaced it with ms pacman, that one and lady bug were the games females gravitated to. Lots of tokens got spent there. I was more into xevious gyruss and asteroids, and the two stingrays of crush roller were much smarter than those ghosts.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @02:22PM (1 child)
Xevious's background music was too repetitive and was a sort of punishment if I got better at the game. At one point I simply had to get away and left my active game going for someone else to resume (some younger kid was hanging around checking coin returns for money).
Gyruss was far better as a game and for the music as well.
Asteroids was cool at first, but I ended up prefering the Blasteroids and similar games of the era that used a spinner to rotate the ship. The games were both harder and easier at the same time; they ramped up the difficulty, but the ability to orient the ship more granularly was likely what lead to the difficulty increase.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 05 2019, @01:01AM
>music too repetitive
But, there is no such thing, especially not around 12m50s [mixcloud.com].
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 04 2019, @03:12PM
I remember when I played I'd duck and swerve my head in response to what was happening on screen. Arcade, I often made it to first orange, I think I made Apple once.
Then I got the Cornsoft Group's SCARFMAN for my Model III TRS-80. Eventually we got Pac-Man for our Atari 2600, and I worked that to the point where I figured out the pattern - I could play the game indefinitely and I remember at least once going for three to four hours on one play.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 04 2019, @04:33PM
My grandparents had an IBM 386 as well as an Atari. Played me some CD-Man, Duke Nukem 1 ep.1-3, Battle Chess, Mahjong, and (A Risk clone. I think it was called Empire or something, I forget. Couldn't find it on google it's not "Classic Empire".) on the computer. Played Spy vs Spy, Dig Dug, and some other games on the Atari. Good times.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @06:51PM
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.