#Pac man cartoon 1983 upgrade
#Pac man cartoon 1983 license
#Pac man cartoon 1983 plus

To fight the huge market of bootleg Pac-Man boards on the market, the upgrade kit was rather heavily copyright protected for the era, including a add on daughter board encased in epoxy.Įarly levels the keys tend to unlock nearby doors while later levels the keys tend to open random doors and of course the ghosts become more aggressive as the game progresses.

#Pac man cartoon 1983 plus

Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus modified the original Pac maze, added new bonus items, new ghost behaviors, and a few other surprises. Released only one month after the release of Ms. This upgrade kit was also a response to the numerous bootlegs, illegally produced, and “gray market” upgrade kits for Pac-Man that had flooded the coin-op arcade marketplace in the USA by 1982. Pac-Man Plus was an attempt to bring quarters back to the original Pac-Manmachines after the successful release of Ms. First was a conversion kit (or upgrade) of the original Pac-Man titled Pac-Man Plus. Pac-Man, or just a capitalistic desire to keep those pixel money presses pumping out quarters, Bally-Midway continued to make sequels and spin-offs to Namco’s Pac-Man for the North American market without direct permission (or little involvement) from Namco. Other articles have stated that Bally-Midway somewhat strongarmed Namco into approving the game, and Namco was reluctant until it was clear soon after production that the game would be another smash hit (which Namco of course, got a large share of the royalties from). The game was developed without Namco's approval, but depending on different reports it seems at some point Namco president Masaya Nakamura was possibly brought in to approve the project development. Due to this legal action, GCC had to present the kit to Bally-Midway for approval, which Bally-Midway in turn bought the rights to using it as a base for a Pac-Man sequel. GCC had developed a similar kit for Atari’s Missile Command arcade machine, which ended up getting the company into a bit of legal hot water with Atari. The kit would change Pac-Man (using new ROM chips and an add on daughter card to the original PCB) into a slightly new version of the game called Crazy Otto. These conversion kits are sold under the idea that a game starts to lose value as players grow bored with the game and seek out newer video game challenges. This is the story of Namco’s Super Pac-Man, and why it perhaps never really got the success in the marketplace it deserved. With this greed the true sequel to Pac-Man developed by the originator Namco would get lost in a shuffle of market saturation, pop culture burnout, and poor-quality side projects. However Bally-Midway would be very greedy for those quarters and wanted more of them.

#Pac man cartoon 1983 license

On the shores of the USA, Pac-Man not only made the original owners of Pac-Man very rich (Namco), but also the company (Bally-Midway) who was lucky enough to gain the license to Pac-Man. He was called Pac-Man and the people of the world knew his name well. Not only did they just love the yellow circle, but they also fed him billions of quarters for many years and in turn made many other people very rich. All these things were good but best of all, there was a yellow circle chased by ghosts who ate a lot of things and people loved him. Once upon a time, there was an era filled with kids wearing plastic Swatch watches, breakdancing in the streets, and eating popcorn to Steven Spielberg movies.