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What can be said about Pac-Man that hasn’t already been said? When most quarter (hehe, get it? quarter?) to middle aged people think of arcades, Pac-Man is THE game. Of course, we’re NES dudes so we want to know what the NES version is like. Well, it is basically identical to the arcade, which makes it awesome!
What we find most interesting about the NES Pac-Man story comes from the Tengen side of things. See, there were three different ports of Pac-Man for the NES. Two by Tengen and one by Namco (the original developer of Pac-Man). Whoever is in charge of the wikipedia page sums it up pretty well:
Tengen unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with Nintendo for a less restrictive license (Nintendo restricted their licensees to releasing only five games per year, and required their games to be NES-exclusive for two years). Nintendo refused, so in December 1987 Tengen agreed to the standard licensing terms. In 1988, Tengen released its first and only three cartridges licensed through Nintendo—RBI Baseball, Pac-Man and Gauntlet. Meanwhile, Tengen secretly worked to bypass Nintendo’s lock-out chip called 10NES that gave it control over which games were published for the NES. While numerous manufacturers managed to override this chip by zapping it with a voltage spike, Tengen engineers feared this could potentially damage NES consoles and expose them to unnecessary liability. The other problem was that Nintendo made frequent modifications to the NES to prevent this technique from working. Instead the company chose to reverse engineer the chip and decipher the code required to unlock it.
What came of this? Those super cool black Tengen carts! Not exactly collectors items, but to an 8 year old they were pretty sweet.
Michael’s high score on this episode was… 42,440! Beat that Billy Mitchell! Justin’s high score was… too embarrassing to repeat. Anyway, another great podcast down.
Paku paku paku paku!
2 Dudes and a NES 