As a round yellow creature consisting of a mouth and nothing else, you maneuver around a relatively simple maze, gobbling small dots and evading four monsters who can eat you on contact. In four corners of the screen, large flashing dots enable you to turn the tables and eat the monsters for a brief period. (Atari, 1982)

It all began with the arrival of the Pac-Man arcade game in 1980. Pac-Man was guzzling millions of quarters and generating a licensing and merchandising firestorm. Numerous home video game companies bid for the rights to the game, and you have to understand, bidding for the rights to produce the home video game version of Pac-Man was like bidding for the toy rights for the next Star Wars movie - very expensive and very high-profile. Money was flying fast and furious. Atari won.

There's only one catch. Atari had but six weeks to get its version of Pac-Man ready in time for the 1981 Christmas season. Failure to put Pac-Man on the shelves in time for Christmas would've been disastrous for all involved. So the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man was cobbled together in record time, packaged, and produced not only record cartridge sales, but astronomically increased the number of console sales. Pac-Man now went from millions of quarters to millions of dollars for Atari.

There was a slight problem, though. The Atari version of Pac-Man was almost insultingly unfaithful to the original arcade game. The jaunty theme music was replaced by something sounded not entirely unlike a touch tone phone. The lively sound effects were replaced by a monotonous, droning tone everytime Pac-Man gobbled a dot. And due to the Atari 2600's inherent sprite limitations, the monsters flickered so badly that it was almost impossible to see them, and was certainly impossible to tell if they were blue or not. It was a given that the maze would have to be reoriented from a tall, vertical structure to a wider horizontal maze to fit the TV screen, but the end result was something that smacked more of a cheap rip-off.

Atari was savaged by the consumer press in general and video game fans in particular.

Rating:  Ten cents - approximately how much one of these cartridges is worth today.

Ms. Pac-Man

As the bride of that most famous of single-celled omniphage life forms, your job is pretty simple - eat all the dots, gulp the large blinking dots in each corner of the screen and eat the monsters while they're blue, and avoid the monsters the rest of the time. Occasionally various fruits and other foods will bounce through the maze, and you can gobble those for extra points. (Atari, 1983)

Some people were surprised when, after the stunning success of the Ms. Pac-Man arcade game, Atari once again landed the home video game rights. Skeptics rolled their eyes, but when Atari unveiled the new home version of Ms. Pac-Man, most everyone was pleased. Even though the game fell just a little bit short of its namesake, it was obvious that Atari had gone through a great deal of effort to capture the spirit of the original. It was, in essence, an apology for the unplayable mess that Atari had delivered with Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man was a smooth-playing game with much more faithful mazes, sound effects, and game play.

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.

Jr. Pac-Man

As the offspring of a round yellow creature consisting of a mouth and nothing else, you maneuver around a bigger maze than your parents ever had to deal with, gobbling small dots and evading four colorful monsters who can eat you on contact. Six large flashing dots in the maze enable you to turn the tables and eat the monsters for a brief period. Periodically, assorted toys will begin hopping through the maze, turning every uneaten dot they touch into a larger dot which yields more points, but also forces little Pac to slow down to digest them. (Atari, 1987)

A few years later, during the twilight of the 2600 platform, Atari visited the Pac-Man well one more time with Jr. Pac-Man, a game which rehashed the basic Pac-Man concept, only this time with a much larger, scrolling maze. Jr. Pac-Man was Atari 2600 Pac-nirvana. The graphics, the music, and the sounds were absolutely spot-on.

All things considered, Atari definitely made a mark with its Pac-Man games and spinoffs. The mark it made the first time around wasn't necessarily a good one, and the Atari 2600 Pac-Man game has become a virtual icon of both the Atari's ubiquitous popularity and its technical shortcomings.

Rating:  Four quarters - a couple of minor irritants, but mostly a compelling and addictive game.