(I’m not sure who I wrote this for or where I submitted it to, but I found it on my hard drive and decided to post it here before deleting it. Enjoy!)
In one of the earliest copyright lawsuits involving video games, Atari Corporation sued Magnavox over the release of their 1981 game K.C. Munchkin, claiming it was a direct rip-off of Pac-Man. Although Atari had previously purchased exclusive rights to publish the first home version of Pac-Man, they had not yet released their (infamously bad) conversion for the Atari 2600 when Magnavox beat them to the punch. Magnavox won the original lawsuit, but Atari had the ruling overturned on appeal, forcing Magnavox to pull Munchkin from store shelves. While Atari may have managed to temporarily stop its competitors from releasing Pac-Clones on home gaming consoles, they had no such luck in the realm of personal computers. As Pac-Mania swept the country so did generic Pac-Clones, invading every retro-computing nook and cranny.
One of the earliest Pac-Clones was Scarfman for the TRS-80 Models I and III, written by Philip Oliver and published by Cornsoft Group in 1981. Scarfman set many precedents that Pac-Clones would follow for years to come. The basics of the game are the same as Pac-Man: avoid ghosts while eating dots. Eating a larger power pellet makes the ghosts themselves edible for a short period of time as well. What’s different are the details; for example, there are five ghosts and five power pellets instead of four. Another obvious difference is that the maze does not resemble the original arcade version. This is partly due to the fact that the arcade version of Pac-Man is displayed on a vertical monitor, whereas computer monitors are conventionally horizontal. Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, most Pac-Clone authors opted to simply redesign their mazes to fit the shape of a normal computer monitor. This worked in the favor of computer programmers, who hoped that unique maze designs would keep them from being sued.
That same year (1981) saw the release of Taxman, written by Brian Fitzgerald and published by H.A.L. Labs for the Apple II. H.A.L. Labs had hoped to escape Atari’s wrath by changing a few minor details in Taxman. The ghosts were reborn as insects and squids and given new names, and the bonus fruits were changed into random objects (a cactus?), but the changes were not enough to ward off the long arm of Atari’s lawyers. With a lawsuit looming, H.A.L. Labs withdrew Taxman from the market and either sold or surrendered (I’ve read both versions) the Taxman source code to Atari. After making a few minor graphical updates, Atarisoft re-released Taxman as Pac-Man for the Apple II. H.A.L. Labs went back to the drawing board and released Super Taxman 2, which was similar to Taxman/Pac-Man but used different mazes. Years later, H.A.L. Labs rechristened themselves HAL Laboratory and went on to develop the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. franchises. Taxman programmer Brian Fitzgerald also remained in the game business. You can find his name in the credits of games such as Dark Seed, StarCraft, Diablo I and II, Warcraft II and III, and World of Warcraft.
Unfortunately for Atari, so many Pac-Clones began popping up that their lawyers did not have the time to pursue them all. By 1982 dozens if not hundreds of Pac-Clones had been released, many by small companies that financially weren’t worth legally pursuing. One such clone was Snack Attack, written by Dan Illowsky and published by Datamost. One look at Snack Attack will tell you it is nothing like Pac-Man at all. Instead of a hungry yellow Pac-Man, players controlled a hungry white whale. See? Not the same! Instead of the ghosts being red, blue, pink and yellow, in Snack Attack they are red, blue, green and purple. That’s completely different! And finally, while the dots in Pac-Man are yellow, the dots in Snack Attack are purple and green. Obviously Snack Attack is nothing like Pac-Man at all.
One of the biggest problems Atari had in fighting these waves of generic clones was that many of them were considered to be better than the official Atarisoft versions! (Then again, almost anything is considered to be better than Atari’s version of Pac-Man for the 2600.) Acornsoft’s 1982 release Snapper for the BBC Micro looked nearly identical to the arcade version of Pac-Man, down to the mazes and characters. Again, under the threat of legal action, Acornsoft withdrew and re-released the game with altered graphics (the main character magically sprouted legs and found a green cowboy hat). H.A.L. Labs, whom Apple had sued for their release of Taxman, obtained the license to release home Pac-Man ports in Japan. H.A.L.’s version of Pac-Man for the VIC-20 is superior to Atarisoft’s official version (and beat Atarisoft’s version to market by two full years). To avoid marketing confusion between the two versions, Commodore changed the name to Jelly Monster for its US release.
Some Pac-Clones attempted to avoid the courtroom by creating similar (but not too similar!) maze games. Munch Man for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A saw a small Pac-shaped character “laying down links” versus eating dots. Another popular maze game, Lock ‘n’ Chase, had players controlling a thief and collecting coins and money bags instead of dots and power pellets. Several other games such as Lady Bug, Amidar, Mouse Trap and Make Trax used similar “maze” concepts, but made enough changes to keep their respective publishers out of hot water.
Other developers simply ignored Atari’s copyright, hoping to fly below the company’s legal radar. Here are just a few known Pac-Clones from the First Church of Pac-Man’s list of False Idols: Ack!-Man, Bac-Man, Dac-Man, Hac-Man, SnackMan, Mac-Man, Plaque Man, Wack-Man, Crap-Man, Chomp, Chomper, Chomper-Man, Gobble-Man, Mouth-Man, Munch Man, and TrashMan, among others. And don’t forget Pac-Bar, PacBoy, Pac-Classic, Pac-Em, Pac-Guy, Packman, PacMac, Pac-Maniac, Pac-Men, Pac-Mon, Pac-PC, PacWar, Pakacuda, Pax, PC-Man, Pucman, and simply Pacman, which, as the site’s webmaster noted, is “just a hyphen away from copyright infringement.”
And if the market wasn’t already flooded with Pac-Clones, it surely was after the release of Data Trek’s Maze Craze Construction Set. Written by Eric Hammond, Maze Craze Construction Set for the Apple II allowed creative Pac-fans to design their own maze games. The program’s editing tools allowed everything from maze layouts to the design and attributes of each individual character to be modified. As a kid I made my own Pac-Clone using the program. I made my game as close to Pac-Man as I could, with the only difference being that in my version, Pac-Man was constantly moving backwards. Its name was naM-caP.
One of the most interesting innovations in the world of Pac-Clones was the transition from two dimensions to three. In 1982, Scott Elder released 3-D Man (also released as 3D Pac Man), a first-person Pac-Clone for the Commodore 64 that literally put players down in Pac-Man’s trenches! Due to the visual limitations of a first person maze game, Elder included a radar on the side of the screen to show players the layout of the maze. The same concept was used the following year in 3-Demon for the IBM PC.
As home computer technology advanced throughout the years, so did the quality of Pac-Clones. Specifically with the advent of VGA and SVGA graphics on DOS machines, colorful Pac-Clones continued to appear. One early popular version was CD-Man, which had players eating dots (of course) while running away from animated spiders. By the mid-to-late 1990s, emulators were powerful and fast enough to run the original Pac-Man arcade code; and yet still, programmers continue to crank out Pac-Clones. Due to the proliferation of the World Wide Web, over the past ten years creators of generic Pac-Clones have migrated to the Internet. There are now hundreds of Pac-Clones online today, written in languages such as Java and Flash. Due to the portability of these languages, many of these Pac-Clones can be now downloaded and played on your cell phone or iPod.
If the thought of playing a Pac-Clone on a small cell phone screen doesn’t sound like much fun, consider Tiny PacMan, a flash-based Pac-Clone which is played on a grid of 10 pixels by 10 pixels. On my monitor, the entire maze appears smaller than my thumbnail. There’s only one ghost (a green pixel) and the dots are flashing purple which, thank goodness, makes them easier to see on such a small scale. The “ghost” gets faster with each level cleared which theoretically makes the game harder. The hardest part for me is simply seeing what’s going on.
One of the newest additions to the Pac-Clone family takes us full circle, back to one of the oldest forms of computer gaming that predates Pac-Man itself: text adventures. Pac-Txt (pac-txt.com) begins by displaying a descriptive paragraph to players: “You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.” Like classic text adventures, the game is played solely through issuing text commands, typed into an interpretor; all information about the game is delivered to players via text as well. Typing “LOOK” and hitting [ENTER] reveals, “You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction. There is a glowing dot hovering near you.” EAT DOT [ENTER]. “You have eaten the glowing dot.”
Through years legal battles it has been determined that while specific characters can be trademarked, specific styles or genres of games cannot. And thanks to that ruling, we have more than twenty-five years worth of Pac-Clones available for us to “gobble” up.
The second annual Oklahoma Electronic Game Expo (OEGE) took place Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at Oklahoma City Community College. OEGE was actually a weekend-long event for me, as out-of-town friends of mine began trickling in Friday afternoon.
Not to be confused with the similarly named Oklahoma Video Game Expo (OVGE), OEGE is organized and thrown by a local college club/group. While the focus of OVGE is (mostly retro) video games, the theme of OEGE is a little more difficult to discern. It’s definitely different than your run-of-the-mill gaming convention; it’s more like a trade show. The focus really wasn’t on buying and selling old games. (There were only three people there selling video games, and two of them were friends of mine who ended up hanging out at my house Saturday night.) Of the fifteen or so vendors who made it to the show, half of them weren’t selling anything at all.
The coolest stuff for me personally at the show was the retro stuff. Local circuit bending musician TV Death Squad performed live for an hour during the show. When I saw a couple of punks carrying in a bunch of DJ equipment I was fearing for the worst, but TV Death Squad turned out to be really entertaining. Halfway through their set, the DJ handed Mason and Morgan hacked joysticks that played different sounds and samples and let them jam along to the music he was playing.
OEGE 2009 also marked the debut of Earl “Phosphor Dot Fossils” Green’s second PDF DVD. Both PDF volumes (Volume I and Volume II) feature three hours of chronological video game footage, commercials, facts and trivia. If you like footage of old games or enjoy things like Pop-Up Video, you will love these DVDs. If you didn’t pick them up at the show, check out Earl’s site and pick them up there for $20 shipped to anywhere in the US. I think there’s a special two-volume set just around the corner as well.
Fellow author Brett Weiss, author of Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984: A Complete Reference Guide was also in attendance. Brett’s always a cool guy to catch up with, and along with his books he was also one of the three tables selling old games (along with Phosphor Dot Fossils and fellow game collector 98Pacecar).
And then there was my table. Last year at OVGE I tried doing too many things at once: demonstrating arcade parts, running a Commodore demo, selling a gaggle of video game stuff and (of course) signing and selling books. At OEGE I decided to simplify things and just sell books. Armed with only the bare essentials (including a box of books and two impressive signs printed by Paco over at Action Signs and Design in Norman — seriously, give Paco a call at (405) 364-3879 for all your vinyl sign and banner printing needs and tell him I sent you!) I set up my space and, along with my buddy Jeff, spent the majority of the day making sad puppy dog eyes at college students as they walked by and sneered at “the guy selling books.”
I was scheduled to give my presentation “Collecting Arcade Games” at 2:30pm, but at exactly 2:30pm there were only three other people besides me in the room, and two of them were my friend Jeff and my son Mason. I waited another ten minutes before starting and at that point there were almost 20 people in the room so I figured that was as good as it was going to get. (Unfortunately my speech was scheduled right during the highlight of the big game tournament, which is where 2/3 of the attendees were by that point in time.) A few other people trickled in late but no one left early, so that was a good sign. As always I started off okay, got really nervous five minutes into the presentation, and calmed down another five minutes later. I’m sure if I saw a video of my presentation (and it was filmed by the college) I’m sure I would hate it, but it felt … well, it didn’t feel like the worst presentation I ever gave, so I guess that’s good. There were no technical difficulties and I was exactly on time so, eh, it was what it was. There were a few people in the crowd smiling and nodding so it felt like I connected with at least a few people.
I connected with a few others during the show. I’m terrible with names but there was the musician kid with the long hair, the kid who I talked to about writing fiction (everybody under 25 is a kid to me these days), and the staff member who I talked to about DOS and old luggable computers and Linux and BBSes. Several years ago at OVGE I found that if I put out modern systems I got a lot of kids standing around playing my stuff all day, and when I put old stuff out I get interesting people to talk to. I also learned that if you put out candy you will have the most popular booth at the show. I skipped the candy this year and played it low key.
As always, my buddy Jeff was indispensable at the show. Jeff helped me run the table, wrangle up Mason, keep an eye on things when I would wander off to take pictures, and basically be “the responsible one”. I could not have done it without him. Again.
Speaking of pictures, I just installed ZenPhoto tonight so I might as well put my OEGE pictures there. Check it out and tell me how it compares to the other (Picasa) albums. I can tell you this — the ZenPhoto album looks like a lot less maintenance when it comes to adding new pictures and I suspect (if it runs okay) I will move everything over to it very shortly.
Thanks to Susan for helping with the house and the party planning. Thanks to everybody who bought a book, came to my presentation, or just stopped by the table to chat. Thanks to Paco for the rush job on the signs, and Drew Stone for doing such a good job on the show. Thanks to Brian, Ginger, Emmy, Darren, Steve, Earl, Charles, Dad, Linda, Doug, and everybody else who came out to the show or hung out at the house this weekend. And finally, extra special thanks to Jeff for putting up with my kookiness and spending his entire Saturday helping me out.
Susan flies out to DC tomorrow; she’ll be gone Monday through Thursday afternoon; Thursday morning, I hit the road for Cleveland. Sometime between now and then, I have to install our new home camera/security system. I’m really looking forward to next weekend, and I’m kind of looking forward to next weekend being over.
“Home” for the PlayStation 3 is essentially Sony’s version of Second Life. Home is a pseudo “virtual reality” environment that allows PS3 owners to create a unique avatar, walk around virtual “places”, and interact with fellow PS3 owners.
Over the past 25 years, keyboards and mice have become the defacto interface devices for computers. With a mouse, computer users are able to select and control programs by pointing and clicking; additionally, through the use of a keyboard, computer users are able to input information by typing. A long existing dream, however, is that there must be a better way to maneuver throughout these virtual worlds we’ve created. We’ve all seen the movie clips where hi-tech hackers slip on their virtual reality gloves and “sort” through virtual file cabinets and folders, looking through virtual documents. In reality, these systems never seem to work as well or efficiently as a simple keyboard and mouse. Using Doom to kill network processes may be entertaining, but it’s certainly not as quick as simply terminating them manually.
Home for the PS3 is an interface of sorts. Through Home, PS3 owners can wander around and talk to people, display their gaming achievements, buy things, hang out with other online people, and so on. Plus it’s free, which was enough to get me to try it out.
Upon selecting Home from the PS3′s media bar, I was warned that the program was about to reserve 3 gig of space on my launch-PS3′s 60 gig hard drive. After downloading and installing the essentials, I was ready to begin my virtual adventure. Almost.
First, I had to create and later customize my avatar. In virtual worlds you can be anybody you want to be, but I must be boring because I typically make my avatars look like me. I picked a body style that looked similar to time (read: fat) and made a few quick choices. Once that was finished, Home let me customize everything — and I mean, everything — about my avatar. I spent five minutes just trying to get my eyebrows to look right. You can move them closer together, further apart, raise them, lower them, make them thinner or bushier, change their color … I mean, really, you could probably spend a solid week obsessing about the details of your avatar. Whether your feet are big, your chin protrudes, or your ears hang low (and wobble to and fro) you can probably make your avatar resemble yourself.
Well, almost. I decided my avatar should wear a baseball cap so I went to pick one and there’s only one you can have for free. You can buy other ones in the virtual mall. In case you didn’t catch that, let me spell it out for you, real slow-like: you can take your virtual person down to the virtual mall and buy a virtual hat … with real money. Got it.
After adorning my virtual-self with all the best free threads available, I was transported to my virtual apartment. Although my apartment has a wonderful view of virtual land, it was pretty sparse in the furniture department. I quickly found the furniture menu and found that everything from virtual lamps to virtual chairs cost real menu. I decided my avatar was a minimalist and didn’t need any more furniture. From what I have read, you can invite other virtual people to come hang out at your virtual pad, but without any virtual snacks to serve (or virtual friends to invite, for that matter) I decided to pass.
One sweet suite.
I got bored of hanging around my crappy house by myself (I can do that in real life) so I decided to follow the prompts and go exploring. My first choice was The Plaza, which seemed like a good place to meet people. I clicked a button on the controller and was whisked away to the Plaza … and by “whisked away” I mean I was prompted to download 20 meg of information. I said yes, waited for the download (it was relatively quick) and then ended up in the Plaza.
Much like any plaza you might see in America, I was greeted by tons of people dancing. I mean, seriously — everybody in Plaza-land just stands around doing either the Running Man or the Robot. By playing with the controller I figured out how perform most of the common actions (there are 20 or so dance moves to choose from!) as well as several text messages you can send, the most helpful of which for me was, “I do not have a keyboard.” Very quickly I realized there are two types of people hanging out on Home — those with keyboards, and those without. Those “with” chat effortlessly with one another, while those “without” type like your grandpa text messages. By the time I was able to hunt-and-peck out a complete sentence with the PS3′s controller, the conversation had usually switched topics. For what it’s worth I got better as time went by, but I would never describe my skills as “proficient,” and I very quickly had to adopt “leet-speak” just to be able to keep up (“wats ur nam”).
So, since this is a social gathering, I moved over to a group of dudes all doing the Running Man and started dancing myself. One guy said he liked BBQ. Another one kept asking what time it was. I kept trying to answer him but by the time I had pecked out the answer, the clock had changed. So, I just kept dancing. Soon our dance party was interrupted by a terrorist, or at least a virtual one. This guy had changed his hair to bright pink and made it look like a turbin. “Bow down, infidels!” he yelled repeatedly. I was going to but I couldn’t find the “Bow” gesture so I just kept dancing. Pretty soon he started dancing, too. World peace through virtual worlds — gotta love it.
Everybody dance now.
I found exactly three girls in the virtual plaza. When I said “Hi” to one she said, “Get lost n00b” and disappeared. The other two (who were dancing together) turned out to be guys in disguise. I have had both of those things happen to me in real life as well so I would give PS3 5/5 for real world accuracy.
Pretty soon I got tired of dancing so I decided to virtually hop to the bowling alley (Now Downloading another 20 Meg … Please Wait.)
I arrived at the Bowling Alley and the first thing I noticed was not as many people were dancing, so I liked it already. In the Bowling Alley I found bowling lanes. When I went to try and bowl, they were all full. At this point I was starting to wonder what the advantage of having virtual bowling lanes were if you can’t just generate more? Where is the gesture button for throwing a virtual temper tantrum? I was about to leave when I found the arcade. Inside the virtual arcade are virtual arcade games, none of which you’ve ever heard of. Most of those were taken (apparently only one person at a time can play them). Sigh. The two that were available were the same game (Icebreaker), which sucked. I was hoping to find the same demos that are on the PS3 network or at least Pac-Man or Pong or something. No dice.
I never tried visiting the actual mall; I couldn’t see paying real money for a different colored hat or shoes. Maybe a better wardrobe would have made the experience more fun or something. After all was said and done, I wish I had spent the two hour time period playing Pac-Man instead.
One of the greatest gaming series of all time was The Incredible Machine, which debuted for DOS in 1992 and was followed by several official sequels and the related “Toons” games. Each game consisted of dozens of levels, and each level has a specific goal that was achieved by creating a machine. Players, using a provided set of parts and tools, would create machines in order to complete a given task and move to the next level.
I really loved the Incredible Machines series. These games were less about speed and graphics and were more about thinking. Many of the levels had one obvious solution, but the game was so open-ended that you could literally solve each level a dozen (or more) different ways. It was what I had hoped the future of videogames would look like. Instead, ID Software released Doom, it caught on, and companies have been churning out Doom clones for fifteen years now.
Fast forward to last week; rumblings of a new game called Crayon Physics have been circulating for a while. Here is a demo of the game:
Obviously the game ia similar to The Incredible Machine, except players are no longer limited to a specific set of provided tools. Instead, players can create their own! As you can see in the video, any object you draw inherits the physics of that object. Wheels roll, ropes swing, axles pivot and so on. While the demo shows the game being played with a light pen, I can assure you that it is completely enjoyable and playable with an ordinary mouse. The video shows the creator erasing objects by “scribbling” on them. With a mouse, this is done with the right mouse button. Also in the video, the creator typically propels the red ball by dropping objects on it; by using a mouse, the left button pushes the ball to the right, and the right button pushes it back to the left.
The beauty of this game is that the only limits are your imagination. For example, some of those levels in the video I posted above look pretty simple to beat, right? Check out some of the creative solutions this guy came up with for those same levels!
Not only does Crayon Physics come with 80 levels, but it also comes with a very easy to use level editor. User created levels can be loaded, saved, and shared online. This game is begging to be ported to the Nintendo Wii or the Nintendo DS (there is a homebrew port for the DS called , but it’s not the real deal), but for now, I have no complaints with the PC version.
Mason played Crayon Physics for over two hours yesterday, working his way through the early levels and later creating his own levels for me to try and solve. After he went to bed, I got to play a little, too. Crayon Physics is the best game I’ve bought in a long, long time, and may be the best $20 game I’ve ever seen. If you wanted to try it out, the author is offering a free downloadable demo to give you a taste.
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