On March 16, 1982, sales of the eagerly anticipated Pac-Man conversion for the Atari 2600 started. The game was supposed to launch April 3, 1982. But some retailers started selling the game early. This wouldn’t happen today, but the 1980s were a different time. Atari didn’t have the power to stop it in March 1982, and although nobody realized it at the time, Atari was at the very pinnacle of its power in the early spring of 1982.
Pac-Man ended up being the best selling video game cartridge of 1982, but in the long run, the reputational damage Atari suffered wasn’t worth the cash it made from the 8 million copies it sold.
Pac-Man Fever
Pac-Man, released in Japan in the summer of 1980 and worldwide in December 1980, was the dominant arcade game of 1981 and 1982 and it became a phenomenon. You could get Pac-Man pajamas, bedsheets, curtains, a board game, a watch, a TV tray, bulletin board, trash can, and almost anything else you could think of. Montgomery Ward dedicated two full pages of its 1982 Christmas catalog to various Pac-Man stuff. It was literally possible to get a Pac-Man themed version of every item in a child’s bedroom.
Pac-Man crossed over into traditional media too. Novelty musicians Buckner & Garcia recorded a pop song titled “Pac-Man Fever” and took it to #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the last week of March 1982. Ken Uston authored a book titled Mastering Pac-Man that became a New York Times bestseller. My best friend’s older sister had a copy that she kept on her bookshelf next to The Simple Solution to Rubik’s Cube by James Nourse. She had the record too. She never let us see either book, or listen to the record, and I’m totally not bitter.
An article in the April 5, 1982 issue of Time magazine speculated that Pac-Man might be the Mickey Mouse of the 1980s. It might have been, too, if a certain turtle-hopping, gorilla-chasing plumber hadn’t come along and kicked him to the side, but that’s another story.
Pac-Man on Atari
Atari licensed exclusive rights to create versions of Pac-Man for home computers and game consoles, and jealously sued anyone who dared create a Pac-Man clone for any system, Atari or otherwise. In some cases, Pac-Man-like games could continue to exist on other systems with enough changes, like Munchman on the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A or Cosmic Cruncher on the Commodore VIC-20. But in other cases, such as 1981’s KC Munchkin for the Magnavox Odyssey 2, Atari forced the game off the market entirely.
The Atari 2600 was the dominant home console, and Atari had high expectations for Pac-Man on its system. A Goldman Sachs analyst expected Atari to sell 9 million copies in 1982. Sales started off well, with a million units in the first month, but sales slowed by summer. Atari still sold 7.2 million copies and Pac-Man was the best-selling cartridge of the year. But it took until 1990 to sell the 8 millionth copy. The game never reached 9 million in sales, let alone in 1982.
If you’ve played the game, you understand why Atari Pac-Man fell short of sales expectations, and that did more than give Atari heartburn and headaches.
Problems with Pac-Man for Atari 2600
The problem for Atari was the quality of its conversion of Pac-Man. Widely panned as one of the worst video games of all time, the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is a magnet for controversy. It was a simplified version of the arcade game, using the same premise, but a completely different maze. Making a faithful version of the arcade game was a challenge for the aging 2600 hardware. The colors were completely different, partly due to an inane corporate policy that only space games could have a black background.
For someone like me who only played the arcade version a handful of times, it was close enough. The object of the game was still to dodge ghosts and try to eat all the pellets on the screen before the ghosts caught you, and whether it was at the arcade or on an Atari, they usually caught me first. No one I knew complained about the game not being enough like the arcade. I remember complaining about the game being too hard. But I also remember being on a date with my wife and spying a Pac-Man machine. I inserted a quarter thinking I might impress her with my Pac-Man prowess and quickly got my butt kicked. So I guess the arcade version is hard too.
For people older than me who had spent countless hours playing the real thing in the early 80s, the Atari 2600 version felt like a cheap imitation, but it didn’t come at a discount price. It cost the full $30 that any regular-issue Atari 2600 cartridge cost. While the premise was the same, the speed of the gameplay and the patterns were all different. The tricks you learned to be really good at the arcade version (and maybe even paid good money for Ken Uston’s book to level up) didn’t apply to Atari’s home version.
It didn’t look like Atari gave it its best effort. Its programmer, Tod Frye, worked overtime for six months to get the game ready. But with only 4K of ROM to work with, he had to make a large number of compromises. When Atari allowed the programmers of the sequels to use 8K cartridges, they were able to make better looking games. In all fairness, Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 had many of the same problems as Donkey Kong.
But the 2600 version of Donkey Kong wasn’t an Atari product. Pac-Man was. And Atari paid dearly for the perception that they mailed it in on this game.
The critical reaction to Atari Pac-Man
The damage came from the critics. Critics not only were harsh on Atari’s version of Pac-Man, but they changed their tone toward Atari itself. Before Pac-Man, critics always gave Atari the benefit of the doubt and the press couldn’t get enough of Atari. It was just like how the press can’t get enough of Apple today. After Pac-Man, it seemed like no critic wanted to risk being the only one who liked each subsequent Atari release. Atari went from being the industry’s golden child to taking a back seat to Coleco and Mattel and even Milton-Bradley. Imagine going from being cooler than Apple at the beginning of March to noticeably less cool than Microsoft by June. That’s what happened to Atari. Youtuber Steve Fulton has an excellent video about the way the press turned on Atari.
Atari didn’t do themselves any favors with its infamous E.T. cartridge in December 1982. But the turning point for Atari really was with the spring 1982 release of Pac-Man. And with the press going from cheering to belittling its every move, it was all downhill for Atari from there. Atari missed its earnings forecast in the 4th quarter of 1982, and 1983 was a disaster. In desperation, Atari started producing its titles for other computers. Pac-Man was no longer an Atari exclusive.
You know the rest. But if that’s TLDR, let’s just say the 1981 Devo song “Through Being Cool” wasn’t about Atari, but it might as well have been.
You felt the video game crash in Europe, you just don’t realize it
If you don’t live in North America, it’s very hip and chic to say you didn’t feel the effects of the video game crash. It’s even hip to say the crash didn’t happen here either. Except it happened. And you did, indeed, feel its effects in Europe. Maybe video game prices didn’t come down and maybe your software publishers didn’t go out of business. But you still felt the crash in a big way. It was just less directly.
Atari changed ownership in July 1984. Exiled Commodore founder Jack Tramiel bought the company and brought in his sons to help him run it. In turn, they started aggressively recruiting Commodore engineers to help them build something new. To them, the Atari 2600 was surplus inventory to liquidate to help fund a new computer.
That new computer was called the Atari ST, and it was the Commodoriest Atari ever. It also actually sold better in Europe than it did in North America, and the Atari ST-Amiga rivalry was bigger in Europe than in North America too. With no video game crash, there would have been no Atari ST, because the ST was a Jack Tramiel thing, not a Warner-owned Atari thing.
Atari’s rushed, shoestring version of Pac-Man was the first domino that led directly to the Atari ST.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I’d recommend you take in my video on Pac-Man for the 2600, as I think you’re off the mark in
numerous points in this piece: https://youtu.be/pop1E2DidVQ
First, contemporary comments from Atari itself indicated they expected to sell 7 million copies in 1982, which is exactly what they did (and as an aside, that still makes it the best-selling console game until Tetris dropped on the NES). Goldman Sachs may have anticipated greater sales but Atari itself didn’t plan for that. I’ll also note the VCS install base in 1982 was something like 12 million, so that’s still very significant. Sales did hit a lull midyear after the initial burst but picked back up in the fall as the holiday approached. Sales also fell in 1983, but that was likely because Atari started bundling Pac-Man with the console early that year and therefore didn’t have as many people taking up standalone copies.
Secondly, you mischaracterize its development. The only person who claims there was a color usage mandate is Tod Frye – none of his coworkers or bosses have ever supported this claim, which leads me to assume he’s either made it up whole cloth or wildly misunderstood a comment someone made. Tod has famously also remarked that he didn’t particularly like arcade Pac-Man, and that for him the biggest priority was ensuring his console port had a two-player mode (which means a bunch of RAM needed to be used to keep track of the other player’s game state instead of going towards literally anything else) instead of the bells and whistles and general gameplay that folks actually appreciated about the original. He was also offered an 8k cart partway into development but chose not to bother since he didn’t really see any part of his program that it could improve.
I’d also say the press response to subsequent 2600 games by Atari like Yars’ Revenge, Defender, Berzerk, Star Raiders, etc. were all very positive, so even though Pac-Man did get frequently mentioned as a let-down it’s not like it was a drag on the critical reception to other games. Historian Alex Smith has also delved deeply into the actual causes behind the North American crash and Pac-Man really doesn’t factor in to it. Significantly, the root causes primarily come down to Atari’s own poor product tracking systems and distributors and retailers over-ordering product due to how production constrained the company had been in 1980 and 81; with something like 60%+ of the market at the time a f***** by Atari hurt everyone, and when suddenly retailers all had double the amount of copies of games from what they wanted it caused a nightmare scenario that took years to work through sales chains. None of that is Pac-Man’s doing – it’s just a convenient scapegoat because people don’t like it very much.
Counterpoint: I would recommend you watch the video I link in my blog piece, as it has good counters to virtually all of your points. And also, my figures came from contemporary news accounts from the time. When the New York Times said in 1982 that Goldman Sachs expected Atari to sell 9 million units that year, and then they sold 7, that’s important information.
Considering the severe limitations of the 2600, they managed to do a good job. It was impossible for them to have made something very close to the arcade version; this would only be solved with the 5200, which managed to port the arcade version almost 100%.
In 1982, the 2600’s hardware was completely outdated. The only way to expand its capabilities was to use resources similar to the NES, such as additional chips. Some games did use extra memory chips, but they were very few.
If the 8KB standard had been implemented by Atari, the games could have been a little better, but with the extremely limited RAM of 128 bytes, there was nothing more that could be done.
I didn’t remember that Pac-Man was released on my birthday (March 16th).