CHEGheads Blog

I Have Pac-Man Fever Again

My fellow CHEGhead Marc Check began his last blog talking about some of the great Pac-Man artifacts in the NCHEG collection and how this character evokes in him a sense of early 80’s nostalgia. Like Marc, I too, caught Pac-Man Fever when it struck in epidemic proportion in 1981. My heart still holds a special place for Pac-Man and his family. Yes, family. Such a global phenomenon was bound to inspire spin-offs, and in this case it included a wife and children.

When Bally/Midway released Ms. Pac-Man later in the year, I immediately switched my allegiance and, like most of my friends, dropped quarter after quarter in pursuit of the high score at the local arcade. With its four distinct mazes and faster action, this game proved much more challenging, and a successful round yielded untold school hallway bragging rights. I can still remember the sense of pride I felt the first time I broke 100,000 points.

In addition to playing arcade games, I also loved the fast action and marvelous sounds of pinball. In 1982, Dave Nutting, an industry veteran who had earlier produced Sea Wolf (1976) and Gorf (1981), launched Bally/Midway’s Baby Pac-Man, a unique pinball and arcade game hybrid. But don’t let the title fool you; this was a difficult game to master. A local bowling alley had a copy and small crowds gathered to watch players challenge the machine on a regular basis.

Players of Baby Pac-Man navigate the video game maze in much the same way they do in both Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, but there are no energizers (power-ups) to help turn the table on the ghosts pursuing Baby Pac-Man. On-screen escape tunnels transition gameplay from the arcade screen to the short pinball playfield below, where players can earn energizers and points. In this way, action between the video game and the pinball play is interlinked in a more significant way than just your final score.

Until recently, when we acquired a working copy of Baby Pac-Man for the NCHEG collection, I hadn’t played the game in more than two decades. When Marc first saw it, his facial expression gave away the fact that like me, he remains a fan. We quickly discovered that in our youth we both had played Baby Pac-Man at the same local bowling alley. I’m planning to challenge Marc to a game here at NCHEG, but first I’m going to play a few rounds by myself to freshen my skills.

You’ll have to excuse me now; I think I may need to take the afternoon and head to the doctor. I have a fever again….

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A Gift of Scuba-Divers, Sunken Treasure, and Secret Ink

“You are a daring deep-sea diver holed up on Hardscrabble Island, a dying little seaport all but forgotten….” And so begins Infocom’s 1984 text-based adventure, Cutthroats, about a search for sunken treasure. Gamer Tim Nichols included a copy of Cutthroats in a large lot of computer games he recently donated to NCHEG, and the game exemplifies different types of materials that are extremely useful in our efforts to preserve the history of electronic games.

Cutthroats, like so many Infocom products, features not only a disk and instructions, but also ancillary materials that players often need to solve the game. These materials include:

• Four Shipwrecks off Hardscrabble Island, a book, supposedly published by the Hardscrabble Harbor Historical Society, that gives a history of the game’s ships and shows a diving map of the wrecks’ locations;
• a price list and tide table from the game’s marine supply store; and  
• a magazine, True Tales of Adventure, featuring funny, mock diving stories and game instructions.

What’s especially ideal about Tim’s Cutthroat donation is that he also gave us many other materials that show how he actually played. These include the backup and save disks he created in accordance with instructions in the game manual; a hand-drawn map he sketched to help him navigate the island; and a copy of the InvisiClues Hint Booklet, which Infocom sold separately to help players who were stuck. Players stumped in mid-adventure could simply take out the marker and reveal a hint printed in invisible ink!

Tim never opened the InvisiClues book, and I was curious as to whether he left it unopened because he never needed it to help him navigate, or perhaps because he didn’t make it far enough into the game to bother using it. In a follow-up email, Tim wrote:

 “I recall spending a few evenings with Cutthroats, but I never really got hooked on the game.  On the other hand, I wasted countless hours playing another Infocom title, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.   My colleagues at the time were playing as well, and we’d gather in the morning over coffee to try and figure out who had figured out what.  It took several of us over a week to collectively figure out the damned ‘Babel Fish Dispenser.’  And the ‘Don’t Panic’ buttons that came with the game were popular to have on the wall of your cubicle.  I still occasionally refer to beer as ’muscle relaxant.’ And I have often referred to the need to ‘don my Peril Sensitive Sunglasses,’ although not too many get the references anymore.  However, I am proud to say that both my teen sons know how to defend themselves from a ravenous ’Bugblatter Beast of Traal,’ and my youngest is intent upon someday perfecting the ’Infinite Improbability Drive.’  That may not make me father-of-the-year, but it makes me smile.”

Thanks, Tim! It’s a great gift.

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International Center for the History of Electronic Games^® • Strong National Museum of Play • One Manhattan Square • Rochester, NY 14607 • USA