It used to have dead-ends and no POWER PELLETs. The maze layout from the planning stage is different than the one that made it into the game. The core of the game did change throughout development, however. During development the team felt the game lacked any real thrill, and there was some talk of adding buttons for attacks, but these ideas never made it into the final game. Iwatani: Right, I wanted to make a game that was not only easy to operate and understand, but one in which you did not kill enemies, either. This desire to make a game anyone could have fun playing came together as PAC-MAN, a simple game that could be played with a single joystick with no buttons for attacks. Iwatani saw some girls really enjoying themselves at an arcade and I remember him saying “I want to make a game that does that for people.” Ishimura: I think we were on our way home from having a few drinks out in Yokohama, right? Mr. *5 SUBMARINE: A shooting game based on submarine warfare released in 1979. *4 Kabukicho: An entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo. *3 SHOOT AWAY: A shooting game based off the sport of clay shooting. *2 Ele-mecha: Short for “electromechanical machine,” this name is used in Japan to refer to arcade machines which are not video games, medal games, or pinball machines, or more loosely all arcade games without monitors. But until video games took over the market, the real kings of the arcades were pinball machines. We also had NAMCO’s SUBMARINE (*5) right there alongside it. Customers would play while out drinking in Kabukicho (*4) and spend one or two thousand yen on a single play session. Sarukawa: In 1977 NAMCO released its “ele-mecha” (*2) game SHOOT AWAY (*3), and it was really incredible. It was a time when we were finding a larger variety of games and more styles of play. At the peak of coffeehouse popularity, there were 165 thousand shops, and 35 thousand of those had video games installed. Production (Semiconductor Procurement), Yoichi HaraguchiĮndo: From my perspective–working to secure locations for our games–block-breaking games took off after the success of Breakout, and the public’s familiarity with video games really grew once these were made into cocktail table arcade machines and started being set up in the over 130 thousand coffeehouses around the country at the time. Haraguchi: Yeah, this perception might have changed a bit after Breakout became a hit, but until SPACE INVADERS took off, most vendors who bought our cabinets felt the same way. NAMCO bought out the Japanese-based branch, ATARI Japan, in 1974 and expanded into the games industry. *1 ATARI: US video game company founded in 1972. You’d often hear vendors talk about how video games just were not profitable. Galaxian came out at the end of the following year in 1979, and PAC-MAN took the torch next in 1980.īack in those early days, however, games would sell well for the first 1 or 2 months after they released, but fall off quickly after that. Taito released SPACE INVADERS that same year, and video games really took off. Breakout then released in 1976, and later in 1978 NAMCO released its first original game, GEE BEE. Sarukawa: It’s been more than 40 years now, so I had to do a little research to jog my memory before coming here today, but in 1972 ATARI’s (*1) Pong became a hit and the Nakamura Manufacturing Company (later NAMCO) bought out ATARI Japan. What was the video game industry like when PAC-MAN was in development around 1980?
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