There's no exact release date for Pac-Man Museum+ just yet, but it'll be heading to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and Steam "early" next year. Additional customisation items can be unlocked by playing games and completing objectives tied to Pac-Man Museum+'s mission-based progression system. Publisher Bandai Namco is also touting Pac-Man Museum+'s visual interface, which takes the form of a customisable virtual arcade, with players able to place cabinets, decorations, and other assorted memorabilia as they see fit. This time around, purchasers will get Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac-Attack, Pac-in-Time, Pac-Man Arrangement (in both its arcade and console guises), Pac-Man Championship Edition, Pac Motos, Pac'n Roll Remix, Pac-Man Battle Royale, and Pac-Man 256. The result: A three-decade-old game is still more appealing than six other games, developed with millions more dollars.Gaming's most iconic inverted pie piece is getting another collection in the form of Pac-Man Museum+, bundling up 14 classic and modern games on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC.Īs that little '+' at the end of the title sort of suggests, this is an expanded release of the original Pac-Man Museum - which launched for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC back in the of 2014 - slapping another five titles onto that original line-up. Using a proprietary game analysis model, an independent game rating team within his company compared Pac-Man against 10 of today’s most popular games. By using updated graphics and presentations, while relying on a basic game engine that has remained more or less the same for decades, Pac-Man became independent of hardware platforms and therefore universal, says Bose. Though originally launched as an arcade game, it was soon ported to various devices like game consoles, computers, mobile phones and even iPod music players.Ītindriya Bose, the head of Sony’s Playstation gaming console business in India, attributes a large part of Pac-Man’s success to its ability to morph across hardware platforms. The game itself was spun, legally and illegally, into numerous sequels over the years - Pac-Man Plus, Jr. There were authorised Pac-Man T-shirts, board games, lunchboxes and music singles. It is estimated to have earned over $100 million in the last three decades for its game developer and its various licensees around the world. Pac-Man’s success wasn’t all cultural either. Though many games before and after Pac-Man have replicated some of these features, very few have been able to replicate all of them. “We used to compare Pac-Man scores in school like the youngsters of today compare GMAT scores,” he says.Įxperts attribute Pac-Man’s multi-decade success to many individual reasons - uncomplicated gameplay, quirky theme music, easy-to-use controls and a non-threatening game environment that appealed to adults, including women. So powerful was the game’s appeal, he adds, that Pac-Man game scores became the de-facto “currency of competitiveness” during the 1980s in schools. “Pac-Man is like the Bible of gaming,” says Alok Kejriwal, the co-founder and CEO of Games2win, one of the largest video game developers in India. That small act saved the game from spray paint and ridicule, in return for unprecedented success and admiration. Fortunately Midway executives were able to imagine what young players armed with a spray-can would do to arcade game machines named “Puckman”, so they renamed it “Pac-Man”. The enemies were four animated blobs, called “ghosts”, which kept crisscrossing the maze in search of Puckman.Īfter lacklustre adoption in Japan, the game headed out to the USA in 1981 through licensor Midway Games. Iwatani’s game involved a yellow blob racing through a maze, gobbling up the dots in its path. Ultimately, it was the choice of a few letters that turned Pac-Man into one of the world’s most successful video games ever, instead of an ideal target for adolescent vandals.įor “Puckman” was the name coined by young Toru Iwatani, a designer with Japanese video game developer Namco, for the central character of an offbeat game he came up with in 1980. No runners may pass a sitting person, but a pac person can pass.
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