Rather than defining the image of Pac-Man for the player, I wanted to leave that to each player’s imagination.” “I designed Pac-Man to be the simplest character possible, without any features such as eyes or limbs. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses, and maybe a mustache. Iwatani himself admitted in an interview there was “temptation to make the Pac-Man shape less simple. In my research over the past year and a half, whenever there is a new game tech-VR, or using Google maps to play-it’s always there in the forefront because it's such a simple game.” That simplicity lies within the gameplay mechanics as well as the character design, famously said to have been inspired when Iwatani ordered a whole pizza for lunch and lifted out the first slice of the pie (a half-truth, but one too good not to share, much like Newton’s falling apple). If anything, I find myself playing Pac-Man 99 for much longer sessions than I'd put in on any other game.” Matches can be over in a heartbeat, they’re never more than a few minutes, yet I keep coming back for more. When he recalled his run at Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Harris says, “I found myself not even wanting to boot it up, because I knew there is no scenario where I have enough time in my day to really accomplish anything in-game.” For 99 the pick-up-and-play factor is also extremely high. Maybe that's due to just being older, having less time, more arthritis, shorter attention span, or needing to find my glasses just so I can read a fucking skill tree,” Harris says with a laugh.
“I racked up about 30 percent completion on half a dozen games during quarantine. “Don’t get me wrong, I love a good, interminably long open-world RPG, but no games I have played in the last year or so have sucked me in like Pac-Man 99 and Tetris 99.” For a variety of reasons, Harris has been struggling to make headway in games recently. He picked up Pac-Man 99 after enjoying playing its battle royale forerunner, Tetris 99. “The 99 titles initially freaked me out due to the ‘battle royale’ designation, but once I realized they were the same games I loved from my youth-just infused with a manic energy and clever tweaks to the gameplay-I was hooked,” he says. Ryan Harris is the writer and host of Nerd Alert! Trivia, as well as a member of my global Mario Kart online group, where he routinely eats red shells for breakfast. I love that, because that tells me: this is the algorithm I know,” he says. What clued him in right away is that “if you have a ghost on your tail, pass through that T-intersection area above the ghost house-the ghosts will not track you through that area. Pac-Man, and which is apparently also present in 99. It’s a result the developers didn’t really even anticipate, as the screen glitches out toward the game’s end.įor Pickles, it’s all about the ghost’s hunting algorithm, the one used in the original as well as Ms. In December of 2013, Pickles achieved gaming immortality, becoming only the eighth man in history to achieve a perfect score on an original Pac-Man arcade cabinet.Įveryone’s journey is different-some take years, even decades to develop the skills necessary for such elite play, but Pickles estimates he spent only about 350 total hours over 18 months in order to go from never having played the game as an adult to a perfect score. Jeff Pickles knows a little something about the enduring appeal of the game. Deep Down, 99 Is the Pac-Man You Know and Love
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