One of my earliest obsessions was Pac-Man. The game came out when I was three years old and I remember being taken with it as early as five. I mean, I was a Pac-Maniac. I played the games every chance I got, watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, played the board game, talked about it constantly, and even drew my own Pac-mazes on pieces of paper and pretended to take Pac-Man around in them.
I was never able to own Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, and by the time the NES came out my obsession with Pac-Man was over and I had moved on to more graphically impressive games, so the highlight of my Pac-Life was when I received the Coleco Tabletop Pac-Man Game as a Christmas present. You can read about it online if you do a little Googling.
I remember being greatly disappointed that it didn’t look as good or play as smoothly as the full arcade Pac-Man, but what did I expect? This was a fraction of the processing power… and the cost. It was a lot better than a Tiger game, that’s for sure. And I still got quite a bit of enjoyment out of it.
I remember one time I was playing a full Arcade version of Pac-Man (can’t remember if it was regular or Ms.) and a man came up to me and explained that if I wanted to see all the cut-scenes, I should focus on eating the dots after a power pill instead of turning around and trying to get the ghosts. This blew my mind and that’s how I played it from that point on.
I don’t play it like that now, though, I usually go for score. I own Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man on XBOX Live Arcade and, although my scores are terrible, they are on the leaderboards. I fire them up every so often when I want to stoke my nostalgia and feel a little bit of what it was like to be a little kid.