The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man (2017)

fastcompany.com

58 points·Ivoah··5 comments

(I'm surfacing a comment I made when this article was linked to in another recent Ms. Pac-Man submission, to help make sure it isn't lost to history.)

The uncredited artist who actually created the final visual design of Ms. Pac-Man was Sharon Perry/Barr, who also worked on Discs of Tron, Spy Hunter, Rampage, Demolition Derby, and many other classics.

(I got to see some design artifacts while working with her on a Sega Genesis game. You can find a mention of this, as well as a picture of her as a vampire, here: https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=the-spectre-files-deathsta...)

Early video games have some of the most fascinating stories about corporate intrigue. There was so much room for players of all sizes to duke it out, and so much legal precedent yet to be outlined.

Ms. Pac-Man started life as "Crazy Otto"-- an "enhancement pack" for Pac-Man that replaced the Z80 with a daughterboard. This daughter-board allowed the creators to selectively patch-out data and code from the original ROMs with their own. This was done to prevent needing to burn ROMs that might contain copyrighted code.

There are some details about a recreation of Crazy Otto (where you can see some of the game graphics) here: http://www.pacificarcades.com/crazy-otto.html

Here's a photo of the daugherboard from Ms. Pac Man (which Crazy Otto begat): http://lawnmowerman.rotheblog.com/images/msaux.jpg

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21099120

Also of interest: GDC Game Postmortem https://youtu.be/rhM8NAMW_VQ

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