And just like Mario and FnAF and Sonic that came after it, it's been an enduring franchise in the world of digital entertainmemnt and still remains with multiple spinoffs, reissues, nostalgia projects, heck, it even had a song in 1981 - Pac-Man Fever (hella cheesy though).

One of these "offspring" is this version programmed by Todd Frye under license of Namco, and released sometime in 1982 - another interesting anomaly is when this was actually released, as some places on the East Coast had it as early as possibly April 1982, while the official release date is still up for debate as being sometime in March of that year. Meanwhile, Todd has gotten some scrutiny for having slapped a royalty check on his door after the game was done in a very quick amount of time of development, as sort of a brag, and the end result being this. Truth be told, I think that "legend" is a bit more exaggerated, and likely he was happy to meet some kind of deadline. Remember, Atari was a corporation, and just like any Corporation, they have deadlines, and Atari likely had a short deadline to make sure the game came out ASAP.

The Crash of 1983 - or 1984, depending on who you talk to, is one of those retro-gamer tropes to talk about of all the ages. People blame E.T. for it, and Pac-Man, but that's not the only reason, adn TBH, I don't remember any time during the 80's when people were trash talking the Pac-Man port. E.T. is mostly to blame in that people did not read the manual, which I'm on the fence about. On one hand, it's a TRADITION almost for people to just pull up a random box of Atari games and pull an all-nighter exploring these games while participating in their own head-cannons as to what is going on in them, nary a manual or piece of paper in sight, save for a manual. If people actually read and understood that once you got out of the pit you stop holding "Up" on the joystick and start using the directions to move left or right....you'd be fine.

Honestly, I think this port is actually pretty good. Sure, thehre have been attempts, and even successes, to create a really good, arcade accurate port in recent decades for the 2600, but that's all an outgrowth of evolution in the implimentation of code and making different design choices than what was offered. People have to remember, the Arcade was about 5-7 years AHEAD of consoles in the early-mid 1980's, and to add on to it, the whole criteria of what the biggest companies felt made a good game at home differed from what they thought would make a good coin op. Your local Pac-Man arcade would have all of it's settings set by the Arcade tech via dip-switches and jumpers inside the cabinet, or a special settings menu, that the players could not alter or know about. At home, with the 2600, you had the keys to the kingdom for the most part, so there needed to be some variety, so that your 4 year old brother could play (some higher numbers are "childrens" levels that are easier to play with slower moving ghosts), or you could challenge yourself, or play against a friend. In total, there are 8 variations, one player and two player - 16 in total.

So what it if has a BLUE background instead of a black one, so what if he's eating "video wafers" rather than "dots", and so what if the ghosts flicker, this was 1982, not 2022, it was 40 years ago. So what if it's the same maze, it's a bloody 2600 game, you want different Mazes, get the NES or put the Arcade original on a MAME cabinet. 2600 Pac-Man is it's own experience to behold, that maybe, once upon a time, was intended as a surrogate for an arcade cabinet, but it bred a whole new set of memories for those of us wwho were too young to go to an arcade, or did not want to blow pocket change on games we could play a variation of for free.