Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

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.

The link is down for me, but I remember reading about this on another website; the coverage is probably of similar quality between the two.

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

Wonderful article. I still play Pacman occasionally thanks to Mame, even though I am much more of a Mr Do! fan (which I also play in Mame).

Ah, how it brings back memories! I did suspect this level of sophistication.

It also remembered me of that talk about collaborative diffusion which used pacman as an sample application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiobjects

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!

awesome freaking post - i love pac man (i actually prefer ms pac man) and it was well worth the very long and detailed review.

That link is down, but you can see the full article at their homepage too: http://gameinternals.com/

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.