Pacman Addiction

In computer news this week, 02/12/2002

I've been playing computer games longer than most of the new game players have been alive .....

Kids today think their computer is a game machine that does internet surfing and email and sometimes their parents use it for boring business stuff like keeping track of their college education funds.

I played my first computer games on an Apple computer in 1979 and of course Space Invaders was the hot game. But in the early 80's video game arcades popped up across the country and the hottest game was Pacman. “a video game in which you navigate a yellow circle with a mouth around a maze eating dots, while trying to avoid being eaten by multicolored ghosts.”

I was working for the Univac Corporation selling mainframe computers and my office was near the Players and Spectators Game Arcade here in town. I and a friend of mine got addicted to Pacman and we spent so much money on it we decided to create a company to try to write off our losses. The Pacman craze was just starting, and we decided to write a book and create a video on how to play it.

One day as I was practicing a guy sat down at the Pacman machine next to me - ran up a score of several hundred thousand points - and disappeared. I asked around about him, and was told that he was called "The Corn Fiend",a reclusive pacman fanatic with the highest scores ever recorded in the arcade.

I realized this guy was our ticket to glory. We had found that once you got to the 9th key level of pacman, that you could use the same pattern over and over, but both of us would lose concentration and eventually our Pacmen would be eaten by the monsters. This guy they called "The Corn Fiend" seemed to have whatever it took to not lose concentration. We staked out the arcade and eventually met him.

It turns out that he worked for the Post Office and had at one time beaten an automatic letter zipcode sorting machine for almost 5 hours - he truly excelled at doing the same thing over and over again. We knew he was our guy.

I knew as a computer person that all programs have holes in them. I had already observed some holes - you could actually run the pacman through one of the monsters without being eaten sometimes. I eventually found a place where you could hide the pacman and the monsters couldn't find him. This allowed our guy to take a break - rest - and continue on. We contacted the Guiness book of records people but they said in a very snotty British way that they didn't recognize "American video games". No wonder our ancestors had that tea party in Boston ....

We had heard rumors about pacman actually blowing up at a certain level, supposedly because it got overheated, but I knew from a computer perspective that probably it was a software crash. Precisely the game counter register could only count up to 256, and the game designers had obviously thought noone would ever get anywhere close to that.

We made our world record attempt in 1982 on a Pacman machine we had won which this guy kept in his house. After hours of play he hid the Pacman in the secret hiding place and went to bed. The next morning a local TV station witnessed the historic event, and we proceded to the summit of the Game Everest noone had before ascended.

At the 257th screen the game display went bonkers, showing garbage on one side and the regular pacman matrix on the other. Our pacman couldn't maneuver and was quickly eaten by the monsters, but we had broken the record. I still have the entire game (painfully boring) preserved on videotape, as well as just the ending the tv stations covered; maybe someday a part of trivia history.

Maybe someday I'll get to be a game geezer and tell my story too. Listen up, you young whippersnappers

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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