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Well, there's no movie, but there is a fun piece of interactive fiction based on Pac Man. If you haven't played it, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl, it's only a few minutes to play. It was part of a mini-competition in which people wrote short IF games based on classic arcade games. There are a few other gems from the competition (Centipede is harrowing, and tough to win, for one. I also got a kick out of "Unlabeled game") but I thought the Pac-Man game was fantastic in how it wove the elements of the game into a story.
  There's a Space Invaders, too, which has a neat little intro story before dropping you into a text-based implementation of the game itself.

Here's a download link.

  You'll need an IF interpreter to play the games. If you don't have one already, I recommend Gargoyle as the best all-around IF player.

Free as in beer, not as in speech. The article lists a number of alternatives with varying degrees of maturity and practical utility...

For example, I'm not going to install KDE on Windows just to read PDFs, and if I'm going to recommend an alternative PDF reader to one of my Average Joe friends, customers or relatives I'm not going to have them download one without an installer or from a website whose name has nothing to do with the product (MuPDF) that looks like it was designed circa 1997. Appearance is everything, you know, which is something that I think has greatly contributed to Firefox's success: both the product and the website look smooth, classy and refined.

No, that's IF. For that, you're going to need Gargoyle or Frotz.

• FoxIt
• Xpdf (win32 binaries available)
• Cool PDF Reader
• MuPDF
• Okular (win32 download)

(yes, there's a ton of good PDF freeware available now)

On that note, let me recommend Adam Cadre's Pac-Man, from the rec.arts.interactive.fiction newsgroup's "Arcade" mini-comp. It's a text adventure pac-man, and it is freaking AWESOME. You'll never look at the arcade game the same way again.
  Also good in that bunch are Centipede (it is possible to survive this one, barely), Loderunner (the game's setting is rather nightmarish, it turns out), and "unlabeled game" which is rather a one-note bit, but what a note!

You'll find the games from the "IF Arcade" event in Arcade.zip over on the IF mirror, but you'll need an interpreter for TADS and Z-code (infocom) formats -- I'd recommend Gargoyle, which is multiplatform on both ends. (I.E., it runs on Win, Mac, and Linux, and it supports games written in Z-code, TADS, Alan, and several other text adventure formats.) Its homepage is over here.

Frotz is kinda lame. I prefer Gargoyle: http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.

Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.

For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).

There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), several contests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner's guides to the format as well.

Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap

There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.

Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.

For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).

There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), several contests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner's guides to the format as well.

Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap

It's "just" a text adventure, but it's reach, convincing, creepy, and free. I highl recommend Michael Gentry's Anchorhead . Your husband has just inherited an old family home from a relative he didn't know he had. You've just moved to Anchorhead. Your husband has gotten a position at the local college. You have a simple task: head over to the real estate agent's office and pick up the keys for your house. Unsurprisingly things go downhill as it turns out that your house and the town have a dark past.

For anyone new to interactive fiction, you'll need a free interpreter. I recommend Gargoyle on Windows or Linux and Spatterlight on Mac OS X.

It's "just" a text adventure, but it's reach, convincing, creepy, and free. I highl recommend Michael Gentry's Anchorhead . Your husband has just inherited an old family home from a relative he didn't know he had. You've just moved to Anchorhead. Your husband has gotten a position at the local college. You have a simple task: head over to the real estate agent's office and pick up the keys for your house. Unsurprisingly things go downhill as it turns out that your house and the town have a dark past.

For anyone new to interactive fiction, you'll need a free interpreter. I recommend Gargoyle on Windows or Linux and Spatterlight on Mac OS X.