PrinceWatercress plays Pac-Man (Atari 2600) - Part 2 of 8

In this entry, we play Game Mode 2 and we read up on the development of the Atari 2600 version of the game.

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By using the game select switch, you'll switch between one- and two-player modes as you switch through the game variations. If you see just the green bar with the number, it's the one-player mode; if you see the green bar and the orange bar and both have the same number, it's the two-player mode.

On Game Mode 2, Pac-Man moves slowly, while the ghosts start at a running speed, which is even faster than the jogging speed. The four speeds in the manual are - from slowest to fastest - crawl, walking, jogging and running.

Also, here's the stuff I read from the Wikipedia article for this version of the game:

After Pac-Man proved to be a success in the United States, Atari decided to license the game and produce it for its Atari 2600 console.

Programming was assigned to Tod Frye, who was not provided with any arcade design specifications to work from and had to figure out how the game worked by playing it. He spent 80-hour weeks over six months developing it. The finished game uses a 4KB ROM cartridge, chosen for its lower manufacturing costs compared to 8KB bank-switched cartridges which had recently become available. As with any contemporary arcade port, the simple Atari 2600 hardware was a considerable limitation. The arcade PAC-MAN system board contained 2KB of main RAM (random-access memory) in which to run the program, 2KB of video RAM to store the screen state, and 16KB of ROM (read-only memory) to store the game code, whereas the Atari 2600 featured only 128 bytes of RAM memory and none dedicated to video: effectively 32 times less RAM. The Zilog Z80 CPU microprocessor used by the Namco Pac-Man arcade system is clocked at three times the speed of the MOS 6507 CPU in the Atari 2600 - though the Z80 typically does less work per clock cycle.

To deal with these limitations, Frye simplified the maze's intricate pattern of corridors to a more repetitive pattern. The small tan pellets in the arcade original were changed to rectangular "wafers" that shared the wall color on 2600; a change necessitated because both the pellets and walls were drawn with the 2600's Playfield graphics, which have a fixed width. To achieve the visual effect of wafers disappearing as Pac-Man eats them, the actual map of the maze was updated as the data was written into the Playfield registers, excluding those pellets that had been eaten. The 2600's Player-Missile graphics system (sprites) was used for the remaining objects; the one-bit-wide Missiles were used to render the flashing power pills and the center of the vitamin. Pac-Man and ghost characters were implemented using the 2600's two Player objects, with one being used for Pac-Man and the other being used for all four ghosts, with the result that each ghost only appears once out of every four frames, which creates a flickering effect. This effect takes advantage of the slow phosphorescent fade of CRT monitors and the concept of persistence of vision, resulting in the image appearing to linger on screen longer, but the flickering remains noticeable, and makes each individual ghost's color nearly impossible to discern. Frye chose to abandon plans for a flicker-management system to minimize the flashing in part because Atari didn't seem to care about that issue in its zeal to have the game released. According to Frye, his game also did not conform to the arcade game's color scheme in order to comply with Atari's official home product policy that only space-type games should feature black backgrounds. Another quality impact was his decision that two-player gameplay was important, which meant that the 23 bytes required to store the current difficulty, state of the dots on the current maze, remaining lives, and the score had to be doubled for a second player, consuming 46 of the 2600's meager 128-byte memory, which precluded its use for additional game data and features.

Oft-repeated stories claim that the company wanted to or did release a prototype in order to capitalize on the 1981 holiday season; however, the retail release was a final product. Frye states that there were no negative comments within Atari about these elements, but, after seeing the game, Coin Division marketing manager Frank Ballouz reportedly informed Ray Kassar, Atari's president and CEO, that he felt enthusiasts would not want to play it. His opinion, however, was dismissed. The company ran newspaper ads and promoted the product in catalogs, describing it as differing "slightly from the original".

To help sales, Atari promoted and protected its exclusive licensing of Pac-Man. It took legal action against companies that released clones similar to Pac-Man. Atari sued Philips for its 1981 Magnavox Odyssey² game K.C. Munchkin! alleging copyright infringement. In the landmark case Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp., the Court of Appeals allowed a preliminary injunction against Philips to prevent the sale of Munchkin cartridges. However, Atari failed to stop other games, such as On-Line Systems' Jawbreaker and Gobbler.

Several retailers assisted Atari with the release of the game. JCPenney was the first retailer to launch a nationwide advertising campaign on television for a software title. Continuing a long-standing relationship between it and Sears, Atari also produced Pac-Man cartridges under the department store's label.

Anticipation for the game was high. Atari stated in 1981 that it had preorders for "three or four million" copies of the Atari 2600 version. Goldman Sachs analyst Richard Simon predicted the sale of 9 million units during 1982, which would yield a profit of $200 million. Pac-Man met with initial commercial success; more than one million cartridges had been shipped in less than one month, helped by Atari's $1.5 million publicity campaign. It became the best-selling home video game of 1982, with over 7.2 million cartridges sold that year and over $200 million ($560 million adjusted for inflation) in gross revenue. It surpassed Space Invaders to become the best-selling Atari 2600 title and the overall best-selling video game up until then. Pac-Man also propelled Atari VCS sales to 12 million units by 1982. Frye reportedly received $0.10 in royalties per copy.

Purchases had slowed by the summer of 1982, with unsold copies available in large quantities. Atari went on to sell over 684,000 cartridges in 1983. It had sold a cumulative 7,956,413 cartridges by 1983, and a further 139,173 units for $706,967 (equivalent to $1,700,000 in 2021) between 1986 and 1990, for a total of over 8 million cartridges sold by 1990. By 2004, the cartridges were still very common among collectors and enthusiasts— though the Sears versions were rarer — and priced lower.