Pac-Man machines reached a total of 200,000, says Valerie Cognevich, editor of Play Meter magazine, a trade magazine for coin-operated entertainment business. The games spawned sequels, songs and Saturday-morning cartoons.īut the fad faded after the U.S. And the most durable of video game superheros, Mario (he still shows up a few Nintendo games every year), did battle with a giant gorilla named Donkey Kong.įame and fortune and pop culture iconization followed. The armless and flute-nosed Q-Bert had to scale a pyramid while avoiding snakes. The sentient semi-circle Pac-Man traversed haunted mazes. Players of Space Invaders, Asteroids and Galaga remember this plot line well.Ī year later, the characters became more important and the problems got more complex. The video protagonist had a space ship (or something resembling one) and obliterated, in varyingly creative fashions, a bunch of objects such as rocks and aliens and insects. Pac-Man.Īrcades began to peak around 1980, in what Christopher describes the “see the bug, shoot the bug” era. But it wasn’t as popular as Spy Hunter, which was certainly no Q-Bert, which had nothing on Defender, which didn’t have the staying power of Galaga or Asteroids, neither of which could hold a candle to Pac-Man, which itself paled in the blinking pink fame of the quicker, sleeker and more liberated Ms. If you don’t remember Frogger, the story of a tiny amphibian trying to hop across a crowded freeway, you only have to think back about 14 years, to the rise and fall of video arcades.įrogger was hot for a while. Or for the price of a top-of-the-line CD home game system, you can have a 7-foot Frogger machine in your living room. Pac-Man for about $700, Christopher says. If the eerie rows of dead-screened Asteroids and Kangaroo and Galaga machines don’t tell you this isn’t a place to play, the sign in the window reading “Not an arcade!” will. The silent shells of outdated games form a maze through the room, and the guts and circuitry of disemboweled machines line a wall. The company’s Phoebus warehouse is a graveyard of ’80s idle diversions. “In the mid-’80s, you could put anything on the street and make money hand over fist,” says Chris Christopher, who works at George’s Amusements, the company that stocks the Grafton laundro-cade. And the vintage machines still exist in laundromats and bars and pizza joints. You can now buy updated versions Pac-Man and Pitfall and Donkey Kong for high-tech home systems. The “classics” of the early ’80s still haunt modern games. “You can put them in these honky tonk bars people are gonna put a quarter in and go back to what they’re doing 10 years ago.” He rents out arcade machines – old and new – to arcades and restaurants. “That’s still a very nostalgic piece of equipment,” says Stephen King, owner of Newport News Amusements, talking about Ms. Pac-Mans than Mortal Kombats on the Peninsula, say the people who make money from the technology. Spencer doesn’t know that this is the single most popular arcade machine in the history of the world. Pac-Man, a 1981 game about a little yellow semi-circle that travels around a maze eating white dots and being chased by ghosts. Measures 24.75 x 68x 33.25″.“I don’t know doodly about the games,” he confesses.īut he knows that people still feed quarters into his Ms. 1 : Arcade Treasures : Encyclopedia of Arcade Video Games : Arcade Fever. As many machines as Bally’s manufactured, clean original Pac-Man arcade games are still quite rare and high in demand.įeatured in Arcade! An Historical Guide to Arcade Machines Vol. Atari actually turned down the North American rights deeming the game too easy. At first, called Puckman, it was changed due to the fact that the middle section of the P could be scratched away to make the name into an expletive. Pac-Man was born from a pan of pizza with one slice missing, as Toru Iwatani of Namco, tried to think of a character for his new game. There was even a primetime animated Christmas special called Christmas Comes To PacLand. The single most popular game of all time, Pac-Man spawned several lines of merchandise and a Saturday morning animated series on ABC that lasted two seasons from 1982 to 1984. This game includes an original Pacman PCB circuit board and fully working joysticks and buttons! One of those original cabinets can be yours! This classic arcade game is sold in the original cabinet with original side art, touched up by our professional art restoration department. Pacman has won it’s way into history as one of the most iconic arcade games ever created.
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