To me, this was the most interesting part of the article:
“To give the game some tension, I wanted the monsters to surround Pac Man at some stage of the game. But I felt it would be too stressful for a human being like Pac Man to be continually surrounded and hunted down. So I created the monsters’ invasions to come in waves. They’d attack and then they’d retreat. As time went by they would regroup, attack, and disperse again. It seemed more natural than having constant attack.”
- Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator
It's interesting to revisit Pac-Man so many years later. As a kid, it was always just a game with unpredictable behavior, incomprehensible in its abstractness. Dissecting it now and providing concrete detail to every movement feels like one of those "destroying my childhood" moments.
My reaction was the opposite. Now I know why my Pac-Men were disproportionately killed by the red and pink ghosts, and learning that their "unpredictable" behavior is the result of simple but clever algorithms makes it even more impressive.
Heh, at the time I posted I hadn't seen that the exact same site was actually linked in the article itself. Having now read the article I have to say this is a great idea for a site and I'll be following it with some interest.
That was so much more interesting than I anticipated! Never was a big Pac-Man fan, and I guess I always assumed that the ghosts were just aiming directly for Pac-Man! To learn that they each have their personalities and targeting mode is awesome and makes the game much more interesting!
tumblr seems to be going up and down, I don't know if that's normal or if I just had bad timing posting this. If it is actually normal I might have to reconsider using it.
I also had some issues with the sheer number of incoming requests overwhelming my server that I've got the images hosted on, but I think I've got that resolved now.
If you're interested in this you might also check out King of Kong is also an interesting documentary on Donkey Kong and the world record holders. Also, it's one of the better documentaries I've seen.
It's an entertaining movie, but I don't like to see it referred to as a "documentary". They did a lot of manipulative editing and such to make things seem a lot more dramatic than they actually are.
After seeing the movie/documentary it's really hard to take anything Twin Galaxies says as credible and that link is just a bunch of Billy Mitchell apologists.
“To give the game some tension, I wanted the monsters to surround Pac Man at some stage of the game. But I felt it would be too stressful for a human being like Pac Man to be continually surrounded and hunted down. So I created the monsters’ invasions to come in waves. They’d attack and then they’d retreat. As time went by they would regroup, attack, and disperse again. It seemed more natural than having constant attack.” - Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator