Ms. Pac-Man Designer Steve Golson Gives The Game A New Spotlight

(Thanks to Dean Wenzel and Mike Louie for both providing a couple of tips here)

Ms. Pac-Man- the most recognizable game characters and names in the arcade business. There are plentiful reasons for that, one of which were the large number of units that the game has managed to sell over the years (note that the numbers you see thrown around generally do not include releases like the 20th, 25th and 30th anniversary editions of Pac-Man, which generally include Ms. Pac as a part of the list).

What many fans of Ms. Pac-Man might not know is the detailed history of a game that was not actually an “official sequel” by Namco Japan but it started out as a hack by some MIT students. Their hacked kits led not only to the development of Ms. Pac-Man but some other arcade titles and they landed the contract to develop a new home console for Atari back in the day. It’s quite the interesting history.

Thanks to a postmortem at GDC 2016 with Steve Golsen, you can now watch a detailed and fascinating history about the development of Crazy Otto, which turned into Ms. Pac-Man. If you have some time, definitely check it out. It’s great not only for the history but offers some insight into game design as well.

Likewise, if you want an older video of the same subject (with some differences on focus), MIT Game Lab has this on Youtube:

If you don’t have a lot of time to spare but are still interested int he subject, IGN.com has a much distilled version of the GDC talk here.