The Escape Route (tunnel) runs from the top and bottom of the screen, rather than the sides. There is also only one fruit, which is called a “vitamin”. The dots Pac-Man eats were changed to dashes and renamed to “video wafers”. They also do not have four distinct personalities, meaning their movements are randomized. The ghosts always immediately pour out of the center box, even on the early levels (which is not the case with the arcade version). The maze design is different, as are the sound effects and scoring system (going by intervals of 1, instead of 10 like the arcade does). This can make the game hard to play if it is not on original 2600 hardware, as the flickering isn't handled well on more current devices. The game uses a flicker effect to allow more sprites on the screen at a time. So although it's clear Tod didn't care about such things, he was far from the only one at Atari.The core gameplay of the original remains the same, but there are many key differences: And where was Atari's Marketing with all their play-testing when this game was turned in? Chances are, nobody in Marketing cared how it looked or played, as long as it had the name. When he threatened to leave Atari during the development unless they offered him more money, Atari should have let him walk, and had someone else work on it (or contract out someone else to do it, which is what they did with Ms. He can come up with all the excuses he wants, but Tod did a shit job on it and was clearly not the right person. Sorry, but to spend 6 months on a 4K game and have it look or sound nothing like the game it's based on is still just as unforgivable, even 36 years later. How come he didn't put a colored background in his 400/800 Asteroids? Most of his VCS games (Pac-Man, SQ FireWorld, Aquaventure, Save Mary) have awful coloring schemes. But to take a game like Pac-Man and not only put a colored background in it but change all the colors, when part of the visual appeal of most games back then was to see (primary) colors against a black background. If the game was purely b&w (w/o even the use of colored overlays, like Air-Sea Battle or Asteroids), then sure, take advantage of the fact the system has color. Brad Stewart and Rick Maurer managed to duplicate nearly every aspect of early b&w games like Breakout and Space Invaders. Clearly everyone else knew what was important, and the rules weren't as unclear or unknown as he likes to claim - if you're doing a coin-op conversion, the objective is to COPY the arcade game as closely as possible. For Frye to say, "Nobody knew what was important" is nonsense. As for the color scheme, look at all the previous coin-op ports that were done. Anyone else would have dropped the 2-player option very early in the dev process, realizing what the restrictions were with having only 4K. He also claims having support for 2 players used up a lot of the available RAM he had, but that haivng it was an "essential part of Pac-Man" and thus refused to drop it, as if we were talking about a co-op feature like with Warlords. but that had he known, he would have fixed them. Tod Frye has often said he didn't understand why people complained about issues like the tunnels being on the wrong sides, or that the colors were completely wrong. It's rather amazing that it looks, sounds, and plays nothing like the original. And there wasn't even an attempt to have the classic theme song to start the game it just sounded like a couple of random notes that didn't even sound anything like a tune.Īn absolute travesty on so many levels, and for me the biggest letdown by far for any home arcade conversion. 
What also made this game awful was the poor color scheme and headache inducing flickering, not to mention the crude sounding sound effects. In fact, I remember that so strong was Atari's "influence," if you will, that after the 2600 version came out, anyone playing Pac-Man in the arcades were now referring to the new naming schemes. Also I disliked putting an eye on Pac-Man (maybe Atari didn't want kids to think Pac-Man was blind?), and that items were renamed - monsters became ghosts, energizers became power pills, etc. It made it feel like I hadn't accomplished anything after the game was over. I hated the new scoring scheme (e.g., 1 point instead of 10, 5 instead of 50, etc.).
I enjoyed the arcade game like the rest of the world back in 1981, and with Atari having the ubiquitous rights for the home version (and generally doing a good job overall), what could wrong? Plenty. As with Donkey Kong (from Coleco) a year later, I remember the critical drubbing the 2600 version received upon release.
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