Ms. Pac-Man

Ms. Pac-Man is a popular arcade game released by Midway in 1981. The sequel to Pac-Man, it is considered by many fans to be superior to its predecessor. It was also one of the more successful of early arcade games as its sales record is still unmatched.

Gameplay

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

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, 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 also a few cosmetic differences. The character controlled by the player is now Ms. Pac-Man, resembling Pac-Man with eyeliner, lipstick, a bow, and a beauty spot. There are new sound effects including new music at game start and a new "death" sound.

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" 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 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. Eventually, a corrupt value is loaded into the pointer to the maze data, and the game becomes unplayable. There is a black screen and the only things available on the 134th level are the ghosts and Ms. Pac-Man. In a sense that is the final maze but you can't beat it. In essence, once you have complete the 133rd stage, you have beaten the game.

History

Ms. Pac-Man was originally conceived as a bootlegged hack of Pac-Man called Crazy Otto^*, 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.

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.

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.^*

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.

Trivia

A Ms. Pac-Man machine has a storyline based around it in the Friends episode The One Where Joey Dates Rachel. The plotline revolves around Chandler entering rude words onto the games 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 doesn't have a high-score screen, displaying only the single best score and the game doesn't 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'll 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 cab appears in the background of the bar scene), in the 1990 movie "The Grifters", in the 1999 movie "Man In 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."

The Ms. Pac-Man world record of 933,580 points was achieved by Abdner Ashman, of Queens, NY, on Thursday, April 6, 2006 at the Apollo Amusements showroom in Pompano Beach, FL, as verified by official referees from the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard, who were present to witness the accomplishment.

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.

Many people have mistakenly called the game Mrs. Pac Man, which can upset many a video game purist.

In the 1980's cartoon version of Pac-man,she was named Pepper because she was never given a name.

Songs inspired by Ms. Pac-Man

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 "Victim of the Video", 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.

External links