A Sequel: How Pac-Man's Wife got her Wings

    Pac-Man, originally called Puck man was an arcade game developed and published by Namco in May of 1980. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing because of a licensing deal with Namco America. Pac-Man became hugely successful and was America's highest-grossing arcade game of 1981 and second highest-grossing arcade game of 1982. Because Pac-Man was a massive hit in the arcades, it warranted a sequel, however, a third-party company would beat Namco to the punch. Let's talk about how one of the most successful arcade games got its sequel.

       

    To talk about Ms. Pac-Man, first, we have to talk about a company that went by the name of General Computer Corporation or GCC for short. GCC was a small company formed by students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. GCC would create and design "enhancement kits" which would be added onto existing arcade hardware. These enhancement kits could be looked at as ROM hacks for official arcade hardware. GCC wanted their next enhancement kit to be for a game that everyone knew, Pac-Man was the perfect game for GCC to enhance. The result of their newest enhancement kit was a game known as Crazy Otto. Crazy Otto differed from the standard Pac-Man arcade game because of the new mazes, new characters, and difficult monster AI.

    Bally Midway got fed up with waiting for Namco to finish their Pac-Man sequel (Super Pac-Man). Midway execs saw gameplay for Crazy Otto and realized that this was their answer to Namco not having a Pac-Man sequel ready yet. Instead of letting GCC release Crazy Otto, Namco, and Midway offered to purchase the game and release it in an official format. Because Crazy Otto was now officially owned by Namco and Midway, they could rework the characters into official characters. GCC was contracted to finish the game and was consulted by Namco at every step of the process.

    After a long development, the game was released into arcades in 1982 as Ms. Pac-Man. Only a few Crazy Otto circuit boards were ever built for development and demonstration. Later that year, the original sequel to Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man (now the sequel to Ms. Pac-Man) released into the arcades. Pac-Man was a hugely successful arcade game that spawned many ports, sequels, and clones and continues to be a widely recognizable video game character next to the likes of Mario/Luigi, Donkey Kong, Link, and even Sonic the Hedgehog.