The Pac-Man Dossier

Note: this page has been there for years. Here is the non-print version dated 2009:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossie...

Oddly this same link to the print version was posted 5 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849017

And several other times:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20pac-man%20dossier&sort=b...

It looks like it was moved to Gamasutra at some point or perhaps was posted to both Gamasutra and the personal blog.

It's cool, for sure, and should be posted over and over, but I find it a little suspect to link to the print version; that sort of thing could be abused, because people could continue to post variations on the same link every day on HN. That could be bad, imo.

Also check out the Making Crash Bandicoot series: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...

The post on GOOL (predecessor to GOAL [1]) is especially interesting.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

It was fascinating to see how individualized the ghosts were. even more sore that their names in the Japanese version hinted at their personalities, but we lost that in the translation to "Blinky, Inky, etc."

The article also explained a number of fascinating mysteries, such as how PacMan can move through a ghost sometimes and that Pac Man can take shortcuts around corners but ghosts can't.

It was also fascinating to read how the difficulty of the game was carefully stepped from level to level according to factors like time, number of dots eaten, etc. With a deceptively simple outlook, the game design had a lot under the hood.

I think a lot of the tidbits in here that aren't obvious to the casual observer is what separates the "good" clones from those with the same pieces but lacking the right "feel". I tried to follow along as much as possible (even reproducing the AI bugs) in my "hungry hank" homage.

The links to Don Hodges site are great if you want the explicit low-level details. For instance, he has a patch to fix the kill screen:

http://donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get2.htm

I made a much less serious patch -- a backwards-facing Pac-Man that places dots instead of eating them:

http://members.shaw.ca/gp2000/bacman.html

The linked Don Hodges article about Level 256 is particularly fun to read, complete with a few proposed patches & a way to make the startup checksum still pass:

http://donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get2.htm

A fun quote - it certainly seems better to have an ending, even if it is not intended:

> "It is probably a good thing that Pac Man has this bug in its program. If it didn’t, expert players could conceivably be able to play the game indefinitely, because whenever they get tired they can just park Pac Man in the hiding places and leave the game to go eat, sleep, or whatever, and then return to the game and continue playing. The only limiting factor would have been the length of time that the game could run without a power outage or suffering from some other hardware failure. Experts would have been able to play the game for weeks, months, even years, or more."

This is fabulous. If you like this, you should also check out the creator's original graph paper drawings (!) of the maze and characters:

https://laughingsquid.com/pac-man-creator-toru-iwatani-share...

Pacman seems in incredibly simple at first but as anyone who has created a clone knows, it contains a lot of intricacies that give it a unique character to it.

It's amazing that the developers were able to put that kind of thought and design into it given the tools and technology of the time.

Very nice man, a good way to start the week reading this article if you like Pac-Man.

Nice article. I really enjoy Pacman, and I still play it on Mame, but my favorite game back then was Mr. Do.