Pac-Man

Atari was seemingly on a roll with arcade conversions around this time. Berzerk, Phoenix. Then they release this! I knew you'd never expect arcade perfection from the 2600, but I also knew it could be done better than this.

Ironically Atari ran anti-Colecovision 5200 ads saying "look how awful pacman is on the colecovision". It was their own pac-man being run through the CV 2600 emulator module!

I remember seeing this in being played in K-Mart and thinking that it was such a disaster. In hind-sight, it really is not a bad game, it just doesn't look or sound much like the arcade machine. It is very playable and really only disappointing when you consider that Ms Pac-man was so much better on the same hardware.

Unfortunately, this was one of Atari's failures. They manufactured 14 million units, but there was only 10 million consoles. This resulted in 4 million cartridges which didn't sell. These along with E.T. (which led to Atari losing $536 million and a contributing factor of the video game crash of 1983), and a bunch of stuff they couldn't sell, ended up crushed and buried in a New Mexico landfill.

As young kids we did not know that there was an arcade game in the world of the adults called Pac-Man and how it felt and looked like. For us at age 7 or 8, Pac-Man was Atari and Atari was this wooden plastic fantastic something. So, for me at least the 2600er Version is what I consider the only true original of Pac-Man, this is the true look and feel, the best version ever, it is a 10.00