It looks like the original Pac-Man, and plays an awful lot like it too, but once you see the titular yellow hero chow down on a line of ghosts 33 deep like some kind of insatiable, eyeless animal, it’s clear the classic formula has been juiced a bit.
It’s Pac-Man 99, Nintendo Switch’s new 99-player online battle royale, and I’ve been low-key obsessed since it came out in April.
My first encounter with Pac-Man was pretty typical for the 1990s. It was a lonely vintage game in the corner at my local Aladdin’s Castle arcade at Countryside Mall, a quiet machine in the glory days of TMNT, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter II. I tended to play it because there was never a wait (it was already considered a relic in 1992) and unlike the fighting games, I could actually survive for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
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Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features.Tim Lapetino, coauthor of the forthcoming art/history book Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon, found the original at his local Pizza Hut—albeit in the “cocktail table” version, with the screen lying horizontally between two players. “It was side by side with a Tron cabinet,” he recalls, “so that was a pretty solid Pizza Hut.”
The eternal nature of its presence in arcades (and Pizza Hut/Hungry Howie’s) is notable—any modern barcade worth its salt will have either the original or a Ms. Pac-Man, and often both.
“It’s an odd game in the sense it was so popular in the ’80s, but then became a staple of arcades even long after tech had moved on,” says Lapetino. “I don’t remember there ever being a time when it was not part of my video game life, and I've played literally every version that’s out there,” even notorious ill-conceived sequels like Professor Pac-Man.
That old cabinet at Aladdin’s Castle may have planted the seed, but it wasn’t when I became hooked. That would have been early 2002, during my junior year of college, when Pac-Man was best played on a NAMCO Classics Playstation disc at the local regs dealer’s apartment, through a cloud of strawberry-Philly scented smoke while blasting Jurassic 5.
