World’s Largest Pac-Man Arcade Now Available

One surprise that was found at IAAPA 2015 was the presence of a new Pac-Man game at the Bandai Namco booth – World’s Largest Pac-Man. With a 150″ screen that uses multi-color LEDs, the IAAPA version had both Pac-Man and Galaga on it but only supported single player at the time. Another unexpected part of the news was that it was developed in partnership with Raw Thrills(who also has worked on Pac-Man Chomp Mania and Galaga Assault for Namco).

(Video of the early IAAPA build)

After some additional development time, Galaga was removed and co-op play was added to Pac-Man. I was able to play it co-op style in Vegas and that is a nice twist on the concept. The contrast on the LED panel is really good and the technology stands out from just having a normal TV (I wonder how a vector style game like Star Wars or Major Havoc would look on this kind of display) They also added a feature that allows the operator to display “up to 3 advertisements” during the attract mode and are billing the game as an interactive video billboard. With all of that completed, the World’s Largest Pac-Man is now available for purchase in Western markets.

It doesn’t appear that they will include additional games on the unit for now. I’m not sure why Galaga was removed as apparently there were issues in the co-op play working right but co-op Galaga has been done before (same with Pac-Man & Dig Dug).  Perhaps a software update will change that but as a huge Pac-Man game, that will attract attention. We have moved this game into the “Already Released” column on our New Releases page. What do you think about this new arcade release?