Pac-Man

It was a thrill to be able to play Pac-Man and create your own cartoon; the action of the game echoed the theme of all the great Warner Bros. shorts: The chase. Add to that the fact that the game really wasn't that hard. One quarter let a good player dominate the machine for a long time, and a Pac-Man novice could gain a sense of mastery after a couple of games. Even little kids could clear a screen or two without much difficulty. And though the design didn't downplay its cuteness, that cuteness was always tempered by the abstraction that the game's technical limitations required.

The result is a game suffused with gentle absurdities, as with the ghosts' names: Inky, Pinky, Blinky and the punch line, Clyde. Or consider the only representational images in the entire game, the pieces of fruit that materialize out of nowhere to be scarfed up for bonus points. The game makes no attempt to explain their bizarre intrusion into an otherwise completely abstract world, and the effect is one of casual whimsy. More than anything else, these ingredients blended to give Pac-Man an aura of uncommon warmth, and it's that quality that most accounts for the fondness with which the game's fans recall it.

The triumph of the original design was never more apparent than when Atari rushed its home version of Pac-Man into stores in 1982. The product was one of the great disasters in the history of home video gaming. Gone was the stately blue-on-black of the original, replaced by a truly hideous orange-on-blue. The bubbly opening theme was replaced by an atonal siren, and the satisfyingly cartoony waka-waka-waka sound of the dot-eating was ditched in favor of a horrific twanging noise, like someone snapping rubber bands into a sheet of tin foil. Playing it, it was impossible to fathom how the game could have been made so ugly. Atari's travesty ultimately not only exposed the limitations of its own gaming console, but signaled the beginning of the end of America's romance with the game.

Bally and Namco did their part to kill the phenomenon, over-saturating the video game market with sequel after sequel. These included the credible and popular Ms. Pac-Man, which capitalized on the game's appeal to girls while also offering more challenging and less predictable gameplay. Unfortunately, the company also threw its weight behind such forgettable titles as the no-dots/all-fruit Super Pac-Man, the video-pinball bastard child Baby Pac-Man, the trivia-based Professor Pac-Man, and the heretical Pac and Pal, in which Pac-Man is assisted by a green ghost whom he has initiated into the discipline of dot-munching. Apart from Ms. Pac-Man, none of the later games contributed anything to the culture or the industry, apart from proving that it was indeed possible for a video game to jump the shark.

But the original Pac-Man was that rare creation that materialized at just the right moment, when its charms, modest in retrospect, took on the power of a revelation. It's not difficult to argue that had Pac-Man not existed, another game would have served its purpose. Asteroids, after all, boasts more fluid and ingenious gameplay. Donkey Kong not only boasts a similarly friendly, narrative cartoon appeal, but its design model -- the platform/jumping game -- has proven far more influential than Pac-Man's closed-circuit maze. Then again, Asteroids and Donkey Kong aren't in the Smithsonian Institution. Pac-Man is.

Contemporary nostalgia now casts the 1980s as a carefree, airhead decade, when we took our cue from the grandfather in chief and smiled our way through junk bonds, exploding space shuttles and Rubik's Cube. But in those secretly uneasy times, Pac-Man was one of the signposts that suggested that the future might be OK, that circuitry could provide the good spirits, character and taste that so much of contemporary culture only pretended to have. We pumped in the quarters and bought the trading cards and lunchboxes and sleeping bags because that lovable yellow guy promised a world where even the lamest kids could get past that first maze, where the ghosts weren't scary and where, even when you died, you went out with a funny noise.

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