6/30/2005
A Small Face-Lift Keeps `Pac-Man,' Fans Smiling
BY HEATHER NEWMANKnight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT) - "Pac- Man," the jolly yellow fellow who helped make video games a phenomenon, turns 25 this year. And he's not yet done snacking on dots: His brightest future may be yet to come, on the very small screen of your cell phone.
When the "Pac-Man" game first became an arcade phenomenon, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide committed to memory the specific patterns he had to travel to eat all the dots and avoid all the ghosts.
It's listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful coin-operated game in history.
To play, you went to your local arcade and dropped a quarter into a big black box. Push the joystick up, down or sideways, and the merry yellow circle moved around a maze, happily squawking "wocka, wocka, wocka" as he went.
Make a false move, and you were rewarded with that now-famous sound, the "deeewwwwwwopppp" that came to be the audible refrain of failure for an entire generation.
"Pac- Man" continues to enjoy healthy sales, and Namco America is releasing a new video game console title, "Pac-Man World 3," in honor of the chubby circle's birthday.
It doesn't bear a ton of resemblance to the original game: This is a 3D title where "Pac- Man" jumps and does other very nontraditional moves to escape those ghosts.
But classic "Pac-Man" also lives on. It's become one of the most-popular video games for cell phones, which has the folks at Namco's wireless division very happy.
"The cell phone is the first mass-market game platform ever," says Scott Rubin, division vice president of sales and marketing.
And "Pac-Man" and the sequel "Ms. Pac-Man" are among the platform's best-sellers, he says. "It's perfect for cell phones and the audience that plays them."
Not only do the controls for the original "Pac-Man" fit perfectly in wireless phones' limited buttons - it is essentially up, down, left and right - but the game lends itself nicely to being able to stand in line for a few minutes and play, which is what cell phone gamers are typically looking for, Rubin says.
Namco America's wireless division is publishing a variety of titles for phones, including some more ambitious 3D titles based on the company's popular console fighting games "Soul Calibur" and "Tekken."
The company is even putting out a version of the light-gun console classic "Time Crisis" that uses the number pad to shoot bad guys in various areas of the screen.
But Rubin says the heart of the cellular games business isn't in these flashy new wonders. They're good games, he says, but not many people have phones with enough features to play them.
That's why core arcade classics like "Pac-Man" sell so well. They'll play on almost any phone with a color display, and the game is exactly like people remember it from the arcade when they were a kid - just much, much smaller.
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(KRT) - "Pac- Man," the jolly yellow fellow who helped make video games a phenomenon, turns 25 this year. And he's not yet done snacking on dots: His brightest future may be yet to come, on the very small screen of your cell phone.
When the "Pac-Man" game first became an arcade phenomenon, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide committed to memory the specific patterns he had to travel to eat all the dots and avoid all the ghosts.
It's listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful coin-operated game in history.
To play, you went to your local arcade and dropped a quarter into a big black box. Push the joystick up, down or sideways, and the merry yellow circle moved around a maze, happily squawking "wocka, wocka, wocka" as he went.
Make a false move, and you were rewarded with that now-famous sound, the "deeewwwwwwopppp" that came to be the audible refrain of failure for an entire generation.
"Pac- Man" continues to enjoy healthy sales, and Namco America is releasing a new video game console title, "Pac-Man World 3," in honor of the chubby circle's birthday.
It doesn't bear a ton of resemblance to the original game: This is a 3D title where "Pac- Man" jumps and does other very nontraditional moves to escape those ghosts.
But classic "Pac-Man" also lives on. It's become one of the most-popular video games for cell phones, which has the folks at Namco's wireless division very happy.
"The cell phone is the first mass-market game platform ever," says Scott Rubin, division vice president of sales and marketing.
And "Pac-Man" and the sequel "Ms. Pac-Man" are among the platform's best-sellers, he says. "It's perfect for cell phones and the audience that plays them."
Not only do the controls for the original "Pac-Man" fit perfectly in wireless phones' limited buttons - it is essentially up, down, left and right - but the game lends itself nicely to being able to stand in line for a few minutes and play, which is what cell phone gamers are typically looking for, Rubin says.
Namco America's wireless division is publishing a variety of titles for phones, including some more ambitious 3D titles based on the company's popular console fighting games "Soul Calibur" and "Tekken."
The company is even putting out a version of the light-gun console classic "Time Crisis" that uses the number pad to shoot bad guys in various areas of the screen.
But Rubin says the heart of the cellular games business isn't in these flashy new wonders. They're good games, he says, but not many people have phones with enough features to play them.
That's why core arcade classics like "Pac-Man" sell so well. They'll play on almost any phone with a color display, and the game is exactly like people remember it from the arcade when they were a kid - just much, much smaller.
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