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| Jr. Pac-Man | |
|---|---|
 Arcade flyer | |
| Developer(s) | General Computer Corporation |
| Publisher(s) | |
| Series | Pac-Man |
| Platform(s) | Arcade, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, MS-DOS |
| Release | Arcade
|
| Genre(s) | Maze |
| Mode(s) | 1-2 players alternating turns |
| Arcade system | Namco Pac-Man |
Jr. Pac-Man is an arcade video game developed by General Computer Corporation and released by Bally Midway on August 13, 1983. It has the same gameplay as prior entries in the series, but the maze in Jr. Pac-Man scrolls horizontally and has no escape tunnels. The bonus item which moves around the maze changes dots into a form which slows Jr. Pac-Man as they are being eaten.
Gameplay
The core gameplay of Jr. Pac-Man is similar to its predecessors. The player controls the eponymous Jr. Pac-Man (who wears an animated propeller beanie), and scores points by eating all of the dots in the maze, while four ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Tim) chase him around the maze and attempt to catch him. Eating a power pellet turns the ghosts blue, briefly allowing the player to eat them for extra points. Once the maze is cleared, a new maze is presented and the gameplay continues.
The mazes are now two times the width of the monitor and scroll horizontally. A total of seven mazes appear throughout the game, and five of them have six power pellets instead of four, but none of them have tunnels that wrap around from one side of the screen to the other.
Bonus items (such as tricycles, kites, and balloons) appear in each round, starting above the ghosts' lair and moving around the maze as in Ms. Pac-Man. As an item encounters dots, it changes them into larger dots that are worth 50 points instead of 10, but they also slow Jr. Pac-Man down more than regular dots. If an item has been out for long enough and encounters a power pellet, it self-destructs, taking the power pellet with it. When Jr. Pac-Man gets caught by a ghost, the larger dots disappear; if there are only a few left, they revert to their original size.
The between-level intermissions show the developing relationship between Jr. Pac-Man and a small red ghost named Yum-Yum who is apparently the daughter of Blinky.
Development
Tim Hoskins worked at General Computer Corporation (GCC) as Jr. Pac-Man's project lead. Hoskins recalled that GCC's founder Doug Macrae came up with the idea of Jr. Pac-Man as a project to develop referring to the game as Pac-Baby in his project notes. Macrae echoed this, while adding that in their previous game Ms. Pac-Man they had created intermissions involving Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man meeting with "Junior Arriving" being the third and final intermission. As Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man were what Macrae described as "huge successes", the continued with the series. During this period in Arcade evelopment, they had the option to develop the game as new arcade cabinet or implement a new hardware kit. Macrae had etched out a plan that involved editing the original Pac-Man kits which changed the collectible items of fruits int the original to baby-oriented items. He developed new gameplay that would allow the maze to scroll horizontally.
Just like with Ms. Pac-Man, there was no source code available to the team to develop the game, leading the team to have to reverse-engineer Pac-Man from ROM dumps. Unlike Ms. Pac-Man which was developed in a few weeks, Jr. Pac-Man took months to make. Situations involving adding scrolling to the map led to difficulties handling items such a when the ghosts were off screen. When investigating the Pac-Man ROM, the found unused elements such as a "fat dot" and another that resembled a flame. This led the team to hypothesize what these items may have done, leading them to introduce a fat dot which slowed the player down even more than regular dots did when Jr. Pac-Man ate them. For the bouncing toys, they thought of the flame items they discovered and decided to implement an explosion when the fat dot interacted a power pellet, giving the player urgency to collect the toy item before risking losing a power pellet. They also had it so if the player had died in the game, the fat dots would vanish. This was implemented to encourage more skilled players to collect them as they were worth more points.
The team also adjusted graphics from the original game, giving Jr. Pac-Man a twirling beanie-cap and giving the game a lower-case font. The group experimented with several ways to show the characters death-sequence, eventually settling on having him shrink down only leaving his beanie-cap. Earlier experiments were coarsers including having Jr. Pac-Man pause then slowly ooze a red substance before the top of his body fell off. The team described creating the new intermissions as difficult, involving creating new graphics and software to drive them.
The game would be the final Pac-Man game made by GCC. Hoskins envisioned other ideas to potentially make as a follow-up such as a Pac-Man game from a first-person perspective but this was never made.
Ports
An Atari 2600 version developed by General Computer Corporation (the designers of the arcade version) was released by Atari Corporation in 1986 with mazes that scroll vertically rather than horizontally, but is otherwise a faithful adaptation. Jr. Pac-Man was later ported to the Commodore 64 and IBM PC compatibles.
Ports for the Atari 5200 and the Atari 8-bit family were finished in 1984, but were scrapped along with Super Pac-Man when the home divisions of Atari, Inc. were sold to Jack Tramiel.
An unofficial port for the Atari 7800 was published in 2009 by AtariAge.
References
- ^ Grannell, p. 67.
- "The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man: A 35th-Anniversary Oral History". 3 February 2017. Archived from the original on 15 June 2018. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
- ^ Grannell, p. 69.
- Grannell, p. 67-68.
- Grannell, p. 68.
- Jr. Pac-Man at Lemon 64
- Reichert, Matt. "Jr. Pac-Man (Atari 5200)". AtariProtos.com. Archived from the original on 2011-04-29. Retrieved 2011-03-05.
- Reichert, Matt. "Jr. Pac-Man (Atari 8-bit)". AtariProtos.com. Archived from the original on 2011-07-07. Retrieved 2011-03-05.
Sources
- Grannell, Craig. "The Making of: Jr Pac-Man". Retro Gamer. No. 85.
External links
- Jr. Pac-Man at the Killer List of Videogames
- Jr. Pac-Man at the Arcade History database
- Jr. Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 at Atari Mania
- Jr. Pac-Man at Lemon 64
- ClassicGaming.com entry on Jr. Pac-Man with screenshots of all the mazes and cutscenes
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