Ms. Pac-Man

Ms. Pac-Man
Ms. Pac-Man
Developer(s)	Midway
Publisher(s)	Midway
Platform(s)	Arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari 8-bit family, Atari Lynx, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Gear, Mobile Phone, NES, Sega Mega Drive, Super NES, ZX Spectrum
Release	1981
Genre(s)	Maze
Mode(s)	Up to 2 players, alternating turns
Arcade system	Namco Pac-Man

Ms. Pac-Man is a popular arcade game released by Midway in 1981. This sequel to Pac-Man differs from its predecessor on the fact that it has different screens. It was also one of the more successful of early arcade games as its sales record is still unmatched.^{[citation needed]}.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Ms. Pac-Man is largely identical to that of Pac-Man, with a few differences.

Ms. Pac-Man moves about the maze significantly faster than the original Pac-Man.
There are now four different mazes, with different colors and "filled-in" walls (compared with the original Pac-Man's hollow walls). Each maze has two pairs of "warp tunnels" connecting the right and left sides of the maze (except for the third maze which only has one set of tunnels). The maze is changed after each of the first three intermissions.
The ghosts have pseudo-random movement, which precludes the use of patterns to beat each board.
The two "fruits" on each level now enter through one of the warp tunnels, wander around the maze for a while making a "thump-thump" noise, then (if not eaten) eventually leave through a warp tunnel.
Clyde is replaced by another orange ghost named Sue, who was later turned purple in Pac-Land to differentiate her from Clyde.

There are new intermissions between the maze changes:

"Act 1 - They Meet": Pac-Man is chased by Inky, Ms. Pac-Man is chased by Pinky; the ghosts bang heads, the Pac-Men escape, and a heart appears between them.
"Act 2 - The Chase": Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man chase each other quickly across the screen five times, with more speed each time.
"Act 3 - Junior": A stork drops off a bundle containing a tiny Pac-Man (later reused in the attract mode for Jr. Pac-Man).

(There are some manuals and websites that report a final "Act 4 - The End" that will play if the score is very high, but this is unconfirmed).

Like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man suffers from a bug in the fruit-drawing routine, which renders the 256th board unplayable. While it may be possible to reach the 256th board using the "rack test" cheat available as a DIP switch (usable through MAME or other arcade emulator), the actual arcade hardware will crash at or around the 134th board. At this point in the game, the data tables used to determine the maze and ghost behavior for a particular level are exhausted and invalid data is loaded. A corrupt value loaded into the pointer to the maze data causes the screen to turn black. Though the ghosts and Ms. Pac-Man are still visible, the game becomes unplayable. In essence, once you have completed the 133rd stage, you have beaten the game.

History

File:Mspacmanmm.jpg

Ms. Pac-Man from Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness.

File:Mspacman-splitscreen.PNG

The 134th board, referred to as the 'split-screen'.

Ms. Pac-Man was originally conceived as a bootlegged hack of Pac-Man called Crazy Otto[1], created by programmers under employ at the General Computer Corporation (GCC).

The programmers, surprised at the quality of the game they had created, showed it to Midway, Namco's American distributor of the original game. Midway had become impatient in waiting for Namco to release their next Pac-Man game (which would be Super Pac-Man), and were enthusiastic that such a game had come to their attention. They bought the rights to Crazy Otto, changed the sprites to fit the Pac-Man "universe," renamed the game Ms. Pac-Man and released it into arcades. The game is considered by many to be Midway's answer to the question of how they could get girls to play their games.

After the game became wildly popular, Midway and GCC undertook a brief legal battle concerning royalties, but because the game was accomplished without Namco's consent, both companies eventually turned over the rights of Ms. Pac-Man to the parent company, fearing a lawsuit. Nonetheless, Ms. Pac-Man was the first of a series of unauthorized sequels that eventually led to the termination of the licensing agreement between Namco and Midway^{[citation needed]}.

Ms. Pac-Man was later released on the third Namco Museum game, however there is no mention of it in Namco's official archives (including the archives on all of the Namco Museum releases).

In 2001, Namco released an arcade board featuring both Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in honor of the 20th anniversary of both games. It also features Pac-Man as a hidden extra bonus game.

Home versions

Like many other games of its era, Ms. Pac-Man was ported to many home computer and gaming systems. It has also been included in Namco's, Microsoft's and Atari's late 1990s series of classic game anthologies.

The Mega Drive/Genesis and NES versions, by Tengen, and the Super NES version, by Williams Electronics, took a few liberties. They featured 4 different maze-sets: the original arcade mazes, bigger mazes, smaller mazes, and "strange" mazes. There was also a "Pac-Booster" option which lets players make Ms. Pac-Man go much faster, making the game much easier and more entertaining. All of these versions also allow two people to play simultaneously, with player 2 as Pac-Man, either cooperatively or competitively.

There is also a standalone, battery-powered version of the game that can be plugged directly into a television. Ms. Pac-Man and four other games (Galaga, Mappy, Xevious and Pole Position) are included in a self-contained joystick hand controller.[2] Ms. Pac Man was also a free game bundled with every Xbox Live Arcade disc for the original Xbox. The Xbox 360 XBLA version was released in on January 9, 2007.

Mobile Games

InfoSpace Games and Namco joined to create Ms. Pac-Man For Prizes, the mobile version of the classic Ms.Pac-Man where players across the U.S. can compete against others in daily and weekly tournaments to win prizes.

Namco also released a version of Ms. PAC-MAN (without the tournament) for play on Palm and Pocket PC devices.

Other versions and bugs

Some versions of the game had an "expert" level, where if you hold the joystick up while pressing the start button, the whole game speed doubled (including music and sound effects). Others have Ms. Pac-Man going twice her speed while the rest of the game went normal speed. The latter allowed for people to obtain much higher scores.

There is an obscure glitch in the original arcade game. If the player inserts a coin at the title screen, before Blinky appears, and begins, the walls of the first maze will be blue instead of pink.

At least one version of the game (found in a diner near the Kansas-Nebraska border) has the monsters turn into blue mice when Ms. Pac-Man eats the energizers. This version may have a bootleg game PCB, insted of the original. ^{[citation needed]}

Record Ms. Pac-Man scores

According to the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard, the high-score on Ms. Pac-Man was the most revered accomplishment in video game playing during the early 1980s. Because of the game's prestige, ABC-TV's "That's Incredible" aired, on October 11, 1982, a Ms. Pac-Man World Championship that was won by Tim Collum, of Boyd, TX.

Twin Galaxies reports that during the 1980s more fraudulent scores were submitted on Ms. Pac-Man than on any other arcade title. This was due to the level of fame accorded to the Ms. Pac-Man champion, which was far greater than for any other game of that era.

Official Succession of Verified Ms. Pac-Man World Champions:

130,300 Rick Greenwasser, Kirksville, MO May 20,1982
201,000 Joe Wingard, Whitefish, MT, June 1, 1982
257,100 Darren Olsen, Twin Galaxies, Ottumwa, IA, March 20, 1983
393,000 Tom Asaki, Bozeman, MT, May 5, 1983
411,050 Spencer Oueren, Twin Galaxies, Ottumwa, IA, June 5, 1983
419,950 Tom Asaki, Twin Galaxies, Ottumwa, IA, June 6, 1983
436,500 Billy Mitchell, 7-11, Hollywood, FL, July 1, 1983
557,120 Billy Mitchell, World Class Amusements, Wilmington, NC, September 20, 1983
681,130 Tom Asaki, Twin Galaxies, Ottumwa, IA, October 2, 1983
703,560 Billy Mitchell, Hollywood, FL, January 27, 1984
820,150 Chris Ayra, Miami, FL April 17, 1984
874,530 Chris Ayra, Victoria, BC, Canada, June 30, 1985
910,350 Rick Fothergill, Stoney Creek, ON, Canada, September 8, 1998
920,310 Chris Ayra, Miami, FL, September 16, 1998
933,580 Abdner Ashman, Apollo Amusements, Pompano Beach, FL, April 6, 2006 Photo: http://www.apolloamusements.com/catalog/images/gallery/abner_big.jpg

In popular culture

A Ms. Pac-Man machine is the basis of a storyline in the Friends episode The One Where Joey Dates Rachel. The plotline revolves around Chandler entering rude words onto the game's high-score screen and then attempting to beat his scores (thus removing them) before Ross's seven year old son arrives. In reality, Ms. Pac-Man does not have a high-score screen, displaying only the single best score, and the game does not allow players to enter their initials.

In one series of strips in Bill Amend's popular newspaper comic strip FoxTrot, Jason Fox, who is in fifth grade and still detests girls, has a nightmare in which he is romanced by Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft. In one of these strips, Lara keeps trying to persuade Jason to play her game, and Jason declares that he will never play a video game starring a girl. At this point, Lara says, "Permit me to reintroduce you to someone," and Ms. Pac-Man appears: "Hi, Jason. Remember me?"

A Ms. Pac-Man unit appears in the 1983 movie "WarGames", in the 1983 movie "Joysticks", in the 1984 movie "Tightrope" (the cabinet appears in the background of the bar scene), in the 1990 movie "The Grifters", in the 1999 movie "Man On The Moon" and in the 2002 movie "Van Wilder".

A Ms. Pac-man machine is seen in Scrubs in the episode My Own Private Practice Guy. Todd comments "Oh Ms. Pac-man I would sex that bow right off your head. Eat those dots you naughty, naughty girl."

In the 1980's cartoon version of Pac-Man, she was named Pepper (while the male Pac-Man was often called Packie) because she was never given a name.

In 1982, R. Cade and the Video Victims recorded a song titled "Ms. Pac-Man", using sound effects from the game, and released it on the album "Get Victimized!", a lesser-known video game song album.

While not inspired by the game, the song Game Over by rapper Lil Flip samples heavily from it.

In the movie Are We There Yet?, Lindsay tells Nick that Kevin had a bad dream playing Ms. Pac-Man at the mall but refers to her as Lady Pac-Man.

The actor Tom Hanks has said "Ms. Pac man is responsible for my pursuit of acting"^{[citation needed]}

External links