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Pac-Man is a classic arcade game that deserves all the love. Guiding an abstract mouth around a ghost-patrolled maze in pursuit of dots is pure joy. As good as it is, I never imagined the greedy yellow circle would bring my family closer together, but that’s exactly what happened this summer. Ever since the Arcade1Up Pac-Man Deluxe Arcade Machine displaced a tatty old cat tree in the corner of my office, I have been battling for the high score with my eldest teen.
As a teenager, figuring out what you want to do and who you want to be is tough at the best of times. Try juggling all of that during a pandemic. And as a parent, you can feel it in your bones when your kids are unhappy. But accepting the unpalatable truth that there’s little you can do about it is one of life’s hardest lessons. My advice, no matter how well-meaning, holds little value right now. My eldest mostly responds to any query about her day with a scowl and the single word “Fine.” The days of playing with Lego blocks, bike rides in the woods, and swimming trips are long gone.
Part of growing up is turning away from your parents, especially during the teenage years. As a dad who always enjoyed hanging out with my kids, that rejection has been a bitter pill that even Pac-Man would struggle to swallow. If I want them to hang out with me now I need a solid sales pitch, so I was delighted when the bleeps and bloops of the new arcade machine brought quizzical teens into my office. They watched me play, and I could see they were itching for a shot. So began a summer pursuit for the high score and the bragging rights that come with it.
Simply Irresistible
Photograph: Simon Hill
Arcade1Up Pac-Man Deluxe Arcade Machine$499 at Amazon
The Arcade1Up Pac-Man Deluxe Arcade Machine arrived flat-packed in a couple of boxes. This easy-to-build cabinet features a 17-inch color LCD screen, a light-up marquee, and authentic arcade controls. It runs 14 Namco games, including Galaxian, Galaga, Dig Dug, and Rolling Thunder, but as the artwork attests, this is all about Pac-Man, and you get Pac-Land, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, and Pac-Mania alongside the original.
Pac-Man began life in Japan in 1980 as Puckman. The nine-strong development team led by Toru Iwatani wanted to make a game with universal appeal. With 300,000 cabinets sold by 1987, gracing every arcade in the land, we can agree they succeeded. The name change for the North American release came amid fears that mischievous vandals would alter the first letter. The arcade was the perfect habitat for Pac-Man, but it has since been ported to every conceivable system and device, racking up an estimated $15 billion worth of lifetime sales.
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It’s hard to imagine anyone is unfamiliar, but just in case, the gameplay challenges our eponymous hero to eat all the dots in an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eat one of the larger flashing dots, known as “Power Pellets,” and you can turn the tables and chomp the ghosts for bonus points that multiply the more phantoms you devour. You also get extra points by eating the fruit that occasionally materializes beneath the ghost’s den. As you progress, everything gets faster, the duration that pellets make ghosts edible for shrinks, and it gets tricky fast.
Pac-Man is elegant and accessible, requiring only a joystick and fast reactions. But it is incredibly addictive. For the first couple of weeks of the summer holidays, my kids were glued to the machine, taking turns as the scores crept ever higher. My youngest then lost interest and disappeared with her friends, but I got locked into a back-and-forth with my eldest. I would hear the distinctive waka-waka sound of Pac-Man eating at all hours. I began to hear it in my sleep.
Refining Technique
We started texting each other photos of the new high score whenever we surpassed the record. The gaps between those breaks grew longer. It reached the point where a smirk as a greeting was enough to let the other know that their high score was gone. We both delved deeper, seeking any advantage, mapping out the perfect order to down those dots.
Did you know that the ghosts move slower through the tunnel from one side of the map to the other? That eating dots slows Pac-Man down? That there are certain routes the ghosts can travel down but not up? That each ghost has its own personality and behavior? That there’s a pass-through bug that leaves you unharmed if you collide at the perfect moment? Or that there’s a safe spot you can hide in, provided the ghosts don’t see you enter?
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There was no internet when I first played Pac-Man, so this was all news to me. But I felt pride watching my kid figure it out, and it got us talking more and hanging out together again. There is no official end to Pac-Man. If you reach level 256 of the original arcade cabinet, it runs out of memory and draws half the screen as a garbled mess. A perfect game up to that point would net you 3,333,360 points. Twin Galaxies lists six gamers as having achieved the perfect score. Our current high score is some way short.
The kids are back at school now, but we ended our summer of Pac-Man at the excellent Game On exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. It covers the history of video games, with more than 200 playable games, from the earliest arcade classics to the latest Rockstar releases. Sadly, the original Puckman machine was out of service, but they had a Pac-Man cabinet that soon sucked us in.
It’s possible to modify the original arcade cabinet game boards, and the exhibition machine featured a souped-up Pac-Man with a single life who was way faster than usual. My daughter gleefully called me over for a game. We laughed and joked as we guzzled those dots at lightning speed, cheering each other on as a crowd of small kids gathered to watch, and it no longer seemed to matter who got the high score.
