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posted by martyb on Friday May 22 2020, @08:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka dept.

PAC-MAN was first publicly tested on May 22, 1980 and — now at 40 years old — is middle-age today. Celebrate with his wife and offspring:

https://www.pacman.com/en/:

Born on May 22, 1980, PAC-MAN immediately rose to meteoric popularity, first in video game arcades, then through an array of branding and entertainment appearances. With a brand recognition rate of 90% around the world, PAC-MAN's image is one of the most recognized on the planet and is as strong as ever as he enters his 40th year of entertaining fans of all ages.

[Ed addition: NVidia has taken this occasion to reveal it trained an AI with 50,000 hours of Pac-Man play. Not necessarily to play it, but instead to create a playable clone that was pretty close to the original.]

So take this opportunity to share some of your Pacman-memories?


Original Submission

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Investigation of Relevance of Simulator Skills to Physical Driving 30 comments

[Ed note: this is a quite old story, but might lead to interesting discussion. What kind of simulators have you operated and how well did the prepare you for the real-life activity? Which ones were successful? Which ones were not?]

Back in 2013, TopGear brought in simulation champion Greger Huttu from Vaasa, Finland to drive a real racing car to investigate how well simulator skills transfer to physical racing. In a nutshell the answer is quite well, aside from the motion sickness.

After one installation lap to check everything's working, he starts his first flyer. All eyes turn to the final corner, a swooping downhill-right with a vicious wall on the outside, ready to collect understeery mishaps. Here comes Greger. The engine revs high and hard and his downshifts sound perfectly matched. Then he comes into sight and, to the sound of many sucked teeth, absolutely bloody nails it through the bend, throttle balanced, car planted. His only hiccup is a late upshift, that has the rotary engine blatting off its limiter. "Time to crank up the revs," says Alan. "He's quick."

The telemetry confirms it. His braking points are spot on. He's firm and precise on the throttle. And in the fastest corner, he's entering at 100mph compared to an experienced driver's 110 - a sign of absolute confidence and natural feel for grip. Remember, this is a guy who has never sat in a racing car in his life - he's only referencing thousands of virtual laps. Then, on lap four, he pops in a 1:24.8, just three seconds off a solid time around here. He reckons the car feels more grippy than it does online, but that's probably down to set-up and baking-hot tarmac. It's a weirdly familiar experience, he says, like déjà vu... with added sweat.

The air temperature is 34 degrees; in the cockpit, it's probably closer to 45. It's just too extreme for the increasingly sickly looking bloke from the Arctic. Then there's the g-forces. Road Atlanta is a bucking, weaving, undulating place, where your tummy floats over crests, then smashes into your intestines through compressions. This is another first for Greger. He's never been on a rollercoaster, or even in a fast road car. In fact, the quickest he's ever been was on the flight over here, which also happened to be his first plane ride. Which would explain why, as he hurtles down the back straight at 100mph, he throws up, right inside his helmet. When he rolls into the pits, little flecks of sick roll down his visor and his overalls are soggy around the neck.

For the most part, he handled the car quite well.

Previously:
(2020) Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine
(2020) Pacman Turns 40 Years Old
(2016) Aircraft Are Now So Automated Pilots Have Forgotten How to Fly
(2014) Video-Game Vehicle Crashes Get Real


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:32PM (#997990)

    >So take this opportunity to share some of your Pacman-memories?

    No.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:50PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:50PM (#997994)

    Once you learned the pattern, it was a real ego boost. Crowds would gather 'round, because there were enough people who didn't know patterns, or couldn't do it even if they knew. This got old fast, of course; but after losing so many quarters there was also a bit of a "stick it to the man" factor in occupying the machine well into the keys.

    Fun Pacman fact: It was originally going to be Pucman, but the designers realized before release that if they did that, it would be subjected to obvious vandalism of P to F, so they changed the name. Based on the high scores of many an old school arcade machine, this was a very smart move.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by el_oscuro on Saturday May 23 2020, @03:40AM (1 child)

      by el_oscuro (1711) on Saturday May 23 2020, @03:40AM (#998060)

      About 39 years ago, I was a teenager without much money - but access to a Heathkit H-89. I had VT-100/NCURSES type graphics with a 9600 baud modem, and 8080 assembly. I had to work with what I had. My "pacman" kind of looked like an arrow, the monsters were reverse video double quotes, and the 9600 baud limited me to 2 of them.
      But I made them bad assed. The would chase you relentlessly, but I had a 128 bit shift-register PRNG so they would turn the "wrong" way about 1 out every 5 turns. All of the other mechanics were exactly like the arcade game. Getting the controls and movement were a challenge which made the game.

      And for scoring? Doing decimal arithmetic is a challenge in 8080 assembly. I was lazy and just looped my ASCII digits exactly the same way a mechanical 1970's pinball machine would.

      --
      SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:43PM (#998137)

        Why do decimal arithmetic? Just do a conversion when the score changes.

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday May 23 2020, @06:02AM (1 child)

      by driverless (4770) on Saturday May 23 2020, @06:02AM (#998081)

      Yeah but think of the poor guy now that he's in his forties. Still expected to chase down nimble young ghosts half his age while he worries about his lumbago, high blood pressure, the fact that he has to wear glasses to be able to read anything at all, and he's overdue for a prostate exam that Mrs Pac Man has been nagging him about for months. Oy vey, and the cost of keeping the kids in college, especially the youngest...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @03:31AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @03:31AM (#998340)

        And to think, Mrs. Pac Man used to be a Mr. Not sure where Ms. Pac Man fits into this.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 22 2020, @11:33PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday May 22 2020, @11:33PM (#998006) Journal

    Pacman always bored me. The song Pacman Fever was fun, though.

    Other games of that time interested me more. Asteroids and Defender were fun, but my absolute favorite of the era was Joust. But I didn't have an unlimited supply of quarters, so I spent most of my video game time playing Atari. Later in high school we got good enough at Gondomania and Double Dragon to finish them on one quarter.

    We could not have dreamed of games like Grand Theft Auto then. Our heads would have exploded if we'd seen them.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @12:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @12:12AM (#998021)

    My long-term memory is shot because of legalized marijuana, but I have fond memories of writing this comment on SoylentNews after reading an article about PacMan.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday May 23 2020, @12:31AM

    by looorg (578) on Saturday May 23 2020, @12:31AM (#998028)

    I can't really say that have a lot of, or any, fond memories of Pacman. In the small town I grew up in it didn't come into the local arcade until the late 80's -- they mostly had pinball machines and then they slowly started with a Defender, Space Invaders and such and then they sort of skipped the 'pacman-generation' and went straight to the next with Outrun, Double Dragon etc when the time came. When they eventually got a Pacman cabinet it was already kind of old compared to some of the other games.

    I had played it some on various home computer systems and thought it was ok but I don't think I ever really saw the "greatness" in Pacman at the time, not really later either for that matter.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:40AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:40AM (#998046)

    Pacman breakfast cereal! Pacman Saturday morning cartoon! Pacman on the Atari 2600!
    Solid '80s!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Saturday May 23 2020, @05:20AM

      by stretch611 (6199) on Saturday May 23 2020, @05:20AM (#998067)

      Pac Man on the Atari 2600 really sucked. Yet I still played.

      Back then even my father played it. Even though he constantly broke my joysticks in the process. He would play it constantly (when he wasn't at a bar with a Pac Man or Ms Pac Man machine.) It annoyed me at the time because when he was home he played it a lot until the joystick broke, then I could not use my 2600 until he got me a new one, not to mention not being able to play with my atari at all back then when he hogged the machine.

      --
      Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @01:49PM (#998140)

      I saw a commercial for Pacman cereal when I visited the US in 1985. Actors clapping their arms together like a Pacman mouth. "You can do it, you can do it with Pacman, Pacman cereal."

      Anybody have a video link, would be great to see again.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday May 25 2020, @03:09PM

      by Bot (3902) on Monday May 25 2020, @03:09PM (#998831) Journal

      Indeed
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY_ESTnBlS0 [youtube.com]

      "Computer games don't affect kids. If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music" --Marcus Brigstocke.

      --
      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by SomeGuy on Saturday May 23 2020, @02:29AM (1 child)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday May 23 2020, @02:29AM (#998055)

    40? So is he now considered too old to work in any video game? Is he old enough now to be hurt and cynical because everything thing knew and stood for has turned to shit? Well, if anyone could take a smart phone down their throat, it would be pac-man.

    Pac-Man's new job involves raping eyeballs, spying, mining data, selling cell phones, and barfing it all back up just to take some giant yellow AI driven cok down his throat.

    Ah, the good old days of popping pills are gone, too politically incorrect. Busting ghosts? Might offend some imaginary sky ghost worshipers. He'd be wise to follow his late friend q-bert and take a leap off of an isometric grid. thunk.

    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday May 25 2020, @03:15PM

      by Bot (3902) on Monday May 25 2020, @03:15PM (#998833) Journal

      > Might offend some imaginary sky ghost worshipers

      Bullshit. Deeply religious kids, who were not allowed more than three quick movements of the joystick at a time, or it's fapping, enjoyed playing pacman:

      the guy ate things in burqa.

      They wanted to modify the ROM so instead of GAME OVER it would show NON PRAEVALEBVNT but it was messy to alter locations back in the day.

      Oh and BTW

      NON PRAEVALEBVNT

      --
      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday May 23 2020, @05:26AM

    by stretch611 (6199) on Saturday May 23 2020, @05:26AM (#998068)

    After 40 years of playing Pac-Man...

    I still suck at it. Not to mention a bunch of other video games I grew up on.

    Though, a few I did well on... Gauntlet in particular; though only after a few years from its release. (My college campus had one.) I was able to play a game solo on a single quarter for 3 hours back then. But most of those arcade games really went through all the quarters I had.

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @06:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @06:48AM (#998089)

    I could've swore I installed Arch an hour ago!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @05:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @05:29PM (#998196)

    There was no such thing as video game arcades until years after PAC-MAN came out. There were many penny (pinball) arcades around, but PAC-MAN mostly debuted at Pizza-Hut for 25 cents a game.

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