The Pac-Man Dossier (2011) [pdf]

I never liked the original PacMan quite as much. I always loved the clones or similar games for other systems or even DOS shareware.

However, it was always easy to spot a fake. They just didn't look right or feel like. Even worse, a bad port like on the NES. It was actually a good port but the characters were way, way too large for the maze! So distracting.

Later on I learned why the programmers made it that way. The original game is a 224x288 screen, with a 28x36 playfield. Each tile is 8x8. The NES has 256x240 resolution, so of course they had to shrink everything down so they could use the original maps.

A game like Pacman is deceptively simple until you start playing your creation and realizing it just doesn't "feel right".

Luckily we have documents like these that point out all the quirks, the original designers were quite intelligent to have these all in there, the hours that went into tweaking these factors are really what makes the game.

A few years back I started writing a Javascript version of Ms Pacman but never really finished it, thought it is playable. https://github.com/robilic/mspacman