Ms. Pacman

Pac-Man, Namco, 1980. Myths abound about the title that for a time was synonymous with video games. Designed by its creator to appeal to females as well as males, the yellow circle and its spawn became the all time earnings champ, filling arcades and bars across the world. Pac-Man appeared on both the covers of TIME and MAD magazines, as well as made cameo appearances on television shows, until getting his own TV special and series. A favorite myth about Pac-Man is that its designer, Toru Iwatani, left Namco after creating the game because of a dispute over compensation. In reality, Mr. Iwatani is still with Namco, and no dispute occurred.

Iwatani created Pac-Man as an alternative to the spate of shooting and space games. He wanted to design a less violent game. The game was released by Bally/Midway for the North American market and keyed what has been called the Golden Age of arcade games: 1981-1983. More than 100, 000 machines were sold in the US alone.

Iwatani was involved in the creation of what would be the most successful arcade game in the history of the American market: Ms. PacMan.

The creators were Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran, two MIT students. Macrae had operated a coin-op route on the MIT campus as a junior (much like Al Alcorn at Atari). He noticed that games like Missile Command were enormously popular at first, then fizzled out as they became familiar or players became too good and played forever on a quarter. He and Curran were engineering students and decided that they could update the arcade machines by adding new circuitry. They built daughter boards (PAL boards) that fit onto the manufacturer's boards, after first disassembling the code and studying the original Atari code (say, for Missile Command). They then overlay their own code on top of that code.

"We were very concerned about copyright infringement because if we just modified their code and sold new ROMs, we thought we would be infringing on the Atari copyrights and end up sued within minutes." Doug Macrae, Ultimate History of Video Games, p. 168.

Their new game, Super Missile Attack, accelerated Missile Command and added enemies (a "mod" of sorts), as well as changing the color scheme a bit. It was successful in the MIT arcades, and they then marketed it around the country, selling the add-on boards for $295 out of advertisements in arcade industry magazines. Garage company. (It cost them roughly $30 to make a board, and they sold over 1,000 the first summer.)

They then decided to modify Pac-Man. By August 1981, they had disassembled the code and figured out how the game worked. Right at the point of being ready to market the game, Atari did indeed sue for copyright infringement, though this was not the real issue. Atari was more concerned with the possibility that any arcade operator could change the machines they had bought, rather than buying new ones. Enhancement boards would ruin Atari's business. So they sued General Computer, Macrae and Curran's company.

"We believed that we had a very moral high ground, in that we had not copied their code. We had the game operator pull the ROMs out of the Atari game and put them into our board, plug our board into the Atari board, and then we overlaid our code on top of it so, we viewed that we were actually relatively free of copying their code." - p. 170. After the case dragged on, Atari approached General about a settlement. They replied that they just wanted to design video games, so Atari essentially bought them out. By this time, the Pac-Man enhancement kit was done, but the Atari agreement required General never to produce such a kit again without the copyright holder's permission. So Curran and Macrae flew to Chicago to meet with executives at Bally-Midway, hoping to bluff them into such an agreement. They brought papers showing Atari had dropped the suit "with prejudice" (admitting it was a wrongful suit). They told Bally they had beaten Atari in court, and they would launch the enhancement kit, but they would like Bally's blessing anyway. Dave Marofske, CEO of Bally-Midway, proposed they "talk sequel." Thus, the enhancment kit (which created a game called Crazy Otto) was modified to an idea more to Bally-Midway's liking, a female PacMan, Ms. PacMan (name). Midway never actually built such a game, they simply added General's enhancement kits to the existing product.

Due to its tremendous appeal esp. to female players, this became the most popular game in the U.S. ever: more than 115,00 machines (compared to 100,000 for PacMan). Later General extended the family with Junior Pac-Man. When Midway sought to add Baby Pac-Man to the line on its own, General sued successfully, claiming origination of the concept of a PacMan family. Even though the game did not do well, General gained a hold on PacMan merchandising, which generated huge revenues.

Nintendo vs. Atari.

1989

Tetris
Tetris Troubles
Tengen acquires the home rights to Tetris and begins selling the extremely popular game. However, it is quickly discovered that Tengen had bought the rights from Mirrorsoft, which did not own the rights in the first place. Nintendo quietly acquires the legitimate home rights to Tetris and releases it under its own label. The Tengen version is removed from the marketplace.