Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

The player uses a joystick to control Pac-Man, navigating him through a maze of consumable dashes called video wafers, opposed by a quartet of multi-colored ghosts. The goal of the game is to earn a high score by having Pac-Man eat video wafers, power pills, vitamins and ghosts. Every time Pac-Man eats all the video wafers in the maze, he earns an extra life and a new maze full of wafers. A group of ghosts roam the maze, trying to eat Pac-Man.

If one touches Pac-Man, he loses a life. Pac-Man can be played as a one-player game or a two-player game with the players alternating turns after Pac-Man is eaten by a ghost.

After Pac-Man proved to be a success in the United States, Atari decided to license the game and port it to its Atari 2600 console (known at the time as the Atari Video Computer System). Programming was assigned to Tod Frye, who was not provided with any arcade design specifications to work from and had to figure out how the game worked by playing it. Frye spent 80-hour weeks over six months developing it. The finished game uses a 4 KB ROM cartridge, chosen for its lower manufacturing costs compared to 8 KB bank-switched cartridges, which had recently become available.

As with any contemporary arcade port, the simple Atari 2600 hardware was a considerable limitation. Joe Decuir said that he and other Atari hardware designers did not expect that a game like Pac-Man, which "pushed too hard", would be ported to it.

Anticipation for the game was high. Atari stated in 1981 that it had preorders for "three or four million" copies of the Atari 2600 version. Goldman Sachs analyst Richard Simon predicted the sale of 9 million units during 1982, which would yield a profit of $200 million. 5 million publicity campaign.

2 million cartridges sold that year and over $200 million ($670 million adjusted for inflation) in gross revenue. It replaced Space Invaders as the best-selling Atari 2600 title and also became the overall best-selling video game up until then (a title it held for several years until eventually being surpassed by Nintendo's Super Mario Bros.) Pac-Man also propelled sales of the Atari 2600 to 12 million units by 1982. 10 in royalties per copy.

Initially, the excitement generated by Pac-Man's home release prompted retail stores to expand their inventory to sell video games. Drugstores began stocking video game cartridges, and toy retailers vied for new releases. Kmart and JCPenney competed against Sears to become the largest vendor of video games. The game's release also led to an increase in sales of the Atari 2600 console.

In retrospect, however, critics often cite Atari's Pac-Man as a major factor in the drop of consumer confidence in the company, which contributed to the video game crash of 1983. Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Gamasutra stated that the game's poor quality damaged the company's reputation. Buchanan commented that it disappointed millions of fans and diminished confidence in Atari's games. Former Next Generation editor-in-chief Neil West attributes his longtime skepticism of Atari's quality to the disappointment he had from buying the game as a child.