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Classic Arcade To Atari 2600 Conversions Rated
Thanks to PeekNPoke for its reviews of the best and worst of classic arcade game conversions on the Atari 2600. The piece looks at which early '80s conversions came off well, and notes Missile Command as one of the best ("Plays even better than the game it tries to emulate, and works very well with the standard joystick"), and Pac Man as less promising ("Usually voted as one of the worst arcade conversions on any system ever, and it is not hard to see why.") Which arcade conversions were you eagerly awaiting, only to find them ruined by classic hardware restrictions?
Would have been nice to see a conversion for the 2600, however it may have ended up a bit like the first game mentioned here.
The problem, really, was with management.
Tod Frye was told in September that he had to have Pac-Man done in mid-October so it could be in stores by Christmas.
He actually negotiated royalties on it (a first for Atari carts) and became a millionaire, because millions of us bought the damn thing even though it sucked.
For a game that he had to hammer out in something like five weeks, it's not all that bad, but of course the 1999 hack of the Ms. Pac-Man cart shows how it could have been done right.
Adam
I know he's being funny, but there's some truth to that.
Ok, I was 8 years old at the time. It was 1982 and it was a time where i first saw the game Donkey Kong at a Pizza Hut, and was amazed because it looked just like a cartoon. I think I would have played anything at the time as long as it could be classed as a video game. This was an age when arcades were leaps and bounds ahead of the consoles.
It was a time when there really weren't many video game magazines. You have to admit that before EGM (you couldn't find "Joystick" at your local supermarket), nobody was really reviewing video games, there was no set standard. Video games back then were a fad like break dancing and the rubiks cube.
I actually got my Atari in 83 when it was in the clearance bin at a Venture department store. There was no way my parents would have put up with today's 200 dollar must have console and 4 year upgrade system that the industry has us to believe is the norm of consumer spending. Chances are, if you were a child of the early 80s you had ATARI, and maybe Colicovision/Intellevision or a home computer if you were lucky. But at the time atari was home video games. And we would have played anything put in front of us. Yeah, I had an Atari because it was cheep, and i played the hell out of it. I got the games that went on the clearance bin, PAC-MAN was one of them. It had a maze, 4 ghosts, power-pellets and a pacman. At the time, it was all the consumer wanted. I don't remember anyone complaining at the time.
Nowadays, it's easy to think of the horrible business mistakes that Atari made, and the landfill of pac-man/ET games, and the complete shovelware that caused the video game crash in early/mid 80's. At the time, I didn't even realize there was a crash. Today is so different, where the video game industry is judged against the movie industry, that it's really easy to come up with snotty reviews against the games that are being released for the holidays. Today, it is more than normal to buy a game based on what some "expert" says about it on some website or magazine, in fact it's a necessity. But back in the day, all you needed to sell spaceman was to produce the maze, ghosts and pacman and put it out on the market before the competition.
I know I'm kind of rambeling on, I guess the point is... If you wrote an article in 1982 about the horrible translation of pac-man for the atari 2600, no one would have any idea of what you are talking about.