Blast From The Past
I've been feeling left out, lately, because I have yet to actually play Pac-Man Championship Edition and thus I can neither weigh in on its awesomeness around my company's water cooler nor post a pretentious review bitching about its 2D graphics. However, when I was leafing through one of my old comics from 1985 tonight(it's a long story involving eBay and a huge pile that teetered ominously on my desk for quite some time; I started to take the pile down and file it away only to be distracted by its bright colors), I came across this little advertisement on the inside back cover.
AHA! Validation! Now, I can comment on Pac-Man without repeating what everyone else is saying! Clearly, Pac-Man CE is a complete waste of time because there is no unlockable fedora for our titular hero to wear. And if there's one thing that makes a guy cool, it's a snazzy fedora.
The really funny thing? I actually have an old cartridge of Pac-Man for the original Nintendo console packed away somewhere under my house. Now, if I could only find the console itself...
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Miscellany on 12 June 2007
· Comments (3)
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This may be the oldest example of a remake or port known to man.
sadly, it isn't the oldest example of a port. The 2600 had ports.
Yeah, I think "Tank" (the Sears version of Combat, the Atari's pack-in game at various points during its early years) is actually the first arcade to home console port, from 1977. It would have been Combat, the original Atari version, except the arcade game was called Tank. Atari did make some home games called "Pong", but I think they were all just miniaturized versions of the arcade hardware rather than a port (since Pong didn't have any software to port.)
The NES port was probably about the 20th home port of Pac-Man. Here in the US, all prior to the NES (when Atari was selling games for other platforms as "Atarisoft", not "Tengen") we had versions for the Atari 2600, 5200, the Atari line of computers, the VIC-20, C64, Colecovision, Intellivision, Apple II, MSX (yes, MSX machines were sold here briefly), TI 99/4a, IBM PC, PCjr. and Tandy 1000 (don't remember if there were 3 separate versions there but there were at least 2), and Tandy Color Computer. I'm sure there were other versions as well that I never played, but I played all of the above ports back in the day.
And of course, bootleggers even ported Pac-Man to other arcade hardware, like Galaxian or Scramble. Those were some pretty funny, messed-up versions of Pac-Man.
Sorry to go all game-historian on you whippersnappers but the phenomenon of widespread (and often crappy) ports is like 30 years old.