Recently, after reading some things online, I was disappointed to learn that the Atari 2600 version of Pacman isn't held in very high regard. In fact, it seems that most of my peers think it downright sucked and that it's universally considered a disaster in the world of video games. Apparently everyone who was anyone hated the game and in one collective voice the whole wide world joined hands and told Atari that it was a huge failure. Well, this certainly would have been news to my brother and I back in 1982. We loved the game. We actually bought our first Atari specifically so that we could play that game. We were tired of pumping quarters into the arcade version at the local ice cream shop and we wanted something that we could play whenever we wanted. We spent hours upon hours playing it. My brother once played one game that lasted almost an entire day. This was before games had a pause feature, so the only way he could get a break to go to the bathroom was to hand over the joystick to me with the quixotic stipulation that he would kill me if I died too many times. I wouldn't hesitate to say that I have fonder memories of the Atari version than of the actual arcade version.
But was it as good as the arcade version? Of course not. No Atari adaptations of popular arcade games were ever as good as their coin-operated counterparts. You accepted that without giving it a second thought. You just figured that was the price you paid to be able to play the game at home. It was the natural order of things. If we had turned on a game and it had looked as good as the arcade version, we wouldn't have known what to do. Our brains would probably have splattered all over the walls. If I look back at it now, it's through adult eyes and 29 years of advancing video game technology. Yes, Pacman only faces one way. Yes, the maze layout is monotonous and constrictive. Yes, the trapdoor exits at the top and bottom of the screen are fairly useless. Yes, the ghosts flicker and they're all the same color. The thing is though, my brother and I didn't care about any of that at the time. We were playing Pacman, in our rooms. Wow!
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| Atari 2600 Version |
This isn't the first time I've been treated to the sight of the internet unzipping its fly and pissing all over my childhood memories. I'm turning 35 in a little over a week and my generation seems to hold a certain ascendant position in Internet culture at the moment. We're just old enough to wax nostalgic, and yet still young enough to know what "WTF" and "BRB" stand for. As a result, the internet is inundated with all kinds of "hip" pop culture references from my childhood. Sometimes this can be kind of cool. It can be neat to find out that something that I thought only I and maybe a handful of kids in my neighborhood knew about was actually a big deal with other kids out there. We weren't all connected like this back then, of course, so sometimes the internet feels like this big class reunion to me.
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| Arcade Version |
But then you have these people. They like to speak with such...authority. They say this sucked or this was awesome, and to anyone who was cool it was as obvious as the blue sky. Well, I'm here to tell you, it wasn't like that. It's never like that. I grew up with these people. A lot of the stuff that they so aggressively claim was "cool", frankly only kids that ate paste were into. A lot of the stuff that they tell you "sucked", only the dopey eyed fat kid with the fudge-sickle mustache was the one complaining about it. I never thought someone was cool because of the toys they played with, or the cartoons they watched. Only kids who were little obnoxious jerks in training would have thought like that. I would never even have conceived of it. I was too busy playing in my room.
I'm not saying I have a problem with someone who didn't like the Atari version of Pacman or anything else that I liked as a kid. I have a problem with people who presume to speak on my behalf, and make blanket claims about what "everybody" thought about this thing or the other. If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. There was no codified standard that everyone fell in line with. Kids argued endlessly about these things then, just like they still do now. People who hop online and declare that everybody knew such and such was cool are people who never got over these old, stupid arguments and now they're living out some delusional fantasy where they get the last word in.
Besides, as far as this Pacman thing is concerned, I think there's a good deal of hindsight involved in these critiques. Unlike these self-proclaimed pop culture authorities, I don't have the slightest idea what other kids thought of the game, and I was only six or seven at the time, so I can't provide you with detailed sales figures. I just know that I can't imagine being quite so jaded back then to have been so nitpicky about the game. It's hard to believe that these kids were standing on the very threshold of home video game technology moaning about flickering ghosts. I have to figure that either they're embarrassed about the wide-eyed children they once were, or someone had a far, far more privileged childhood than I did.
