Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Ann Arbor style
PAC-MAN's 30th Birthday! Doodle with PAC-MAN™ & ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc.
Pinball Pete's
Pinball Pete's has Pacman games in the basement on South University Avenue. Do they have the original Pac-Man, or Ms. Pac-Man? Time for some research.
I did an exhaustive roundup of pinball arcades in town back in October, after the building across the street from the current Pinball Pete's - a former Campus Pinball location - burned in a fire.
University of Michigan Video Game archives
Play classic home arcade versions of Pac-Man on original equipment, including a Pacman for the Atari 2600 published in 1981. The video game library is carefully enough cataloged that you can find 8 versions of the game for several systems.
James Dickson did a review of the video game archive back in May. The official web site lists summer hours, noon to 7 p.m.
Real live Pac-man
University of Michigan students do a real live Pacman prank on Central Campus in 2007, with a monster (Blinky?) chasing Pac-Man through Angell Hall and the UGLI. Boing Boing has contemporary coverage of the event.
Style guide
How do you spell Pac-Man?
Wikipedia refers to it consistently throughout as Pac-Man. Google has 7,260,000 results for the hyphenated name.
There's 9,990,000 results for Pacman (no hyphen), but some of those headlines refer to Adam "Pacman" Jones (also variously Pac-Man Jones), a football player who played for current University of Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez while he was at West Virginia.
The official 30th anniversary Pacman site, Pacman.com, was unavailable for comment at press time (presumably it was down from heavy load). The Google page's credits read "PAC-MAN's 30th Birthday! Doodle with PAC-MAN™ ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc."
Edward Vielmetti feeds quarters into machines for AnnArbor.com. Contact edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.Â
Comments
Michigan Reader
Fri, May 21, 2010 : 8:20 p.m.
I heard on a radio station, that this was the 30th year of the game, and that someone scored a perfect score in 1999. The announcer said he didn't know there was a perfect score, but said it was 3 million and something. Wow! Some talent there to get that high of a score.
Soothslayer
Fri, May 21, 2010 : 6:30 p.m.
I remember the first time I saw the arcade version of original Pac-Man, was at Detroit Metro airport inside one of the store vendors. There was a crowd around some guy who must have been very good. Pac-Man Fever began! Nice article on creator: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/05/pac-man-30-years/
Patti Smith
Fri, May 21, 2010 : 5:52 p.m.
I'm proud to announce that I was the Pac Man champ of my 4th and 5th grade (circa 1982ish). I ran into the game at a bowling alley once and it all came back to me...I think I was on the game for an hour before my friends dragged me away :) The addiction never dies.
Lokalisierung
Fri, May 21, 2010 : 4:34 p.m.
Probably a Ms. Pac-man as it is "usually" the faster version of the game.