(AfroGamers.com) Nowadays in gaming, the need to use your imagination while playing the game isn’t particularly necessary. Visually and sonically, video games have become interactive films and television shows where you can either experience the story as the protagonist or create your own adventures as the hero or villain. The stories told now are very detailed and well-told—even the mediocre stories.
Honestly, the stories should be at this level given the time and resources that go into development. If the story didn’t match the investment and you got a cinematic Pac-Man with no storyline or anything, that’s pretty much a lost investment unless it becomes a blockbuster. Just by 2020s standards, players expect a little more. Of course, there was a time when this approach worked. Mind you, it was roughly forty or more years ago.
There Were Old Games Where We Could Figure It Out
When Asteroid, Space Invader, and Defender came out we have some idea as to what’s going on. They’re sci-fi games and by the late 1970s-early 1980s, there had been enough alien invasions in pop culture that we didn’t need an extreme amount of imagination. I mean, now these games would need a lot more backstory.
Bowser—or King Koopa—didn’t come off as a dragon looking at Super Mario Bros but he was dragon-like. With Super Mario running from fortress to castle over and over, we quickly gathered it was one of those rescue-the-princess deals after the first castle. The instruction manual to The Legend of Zelda didn’t explain a ton about the overall story but there was enough there and a world to transverse that there was enough there to work with for players.
As the 80s and 90s went on, the storytelling got better as the hardware improved. Sure, there were stories that made no sense or just started off with the character ready to venture out but as the game goes on, we actually got more of the story. However, there were games that told you nothing.
Then There’s Pac-Man
Pac-Man is one or gaming’s known heroes and one of the distinctive heroes. In his base form, Pac-Man is merely a yellow circle that can open his mouth. Promotionally, he has eyes, a nose, limbs, gloves, and boots. While playing the game, you don’t gather any of that. That goodness for the iconic cabinet artwork! The other characters of note—the Ghosts—were more defined in game but less in the artwork. I mean, they actually had a shape to them.
More defined was the maze where all of this took place. Which is like—what was this? This is where our imaginations go into overdrive. See, PM was constantly moving from maze to maze, eating pellets and power pellets while eating the Ghosts. The end goal was to clear all of the pellets in a level, that’s it. Maybe in 1980, that was enough.
In 1980, Pac-Man was pretty ahead visually while being deceptively simple enough to draw massive numbers of players in. Still, as someone who likes story and lore, the first game just didn’t explain anything. Why was Pac-Man even in the maze? Who built it so endlessly? These Ghosts: why are they in the maze and why are they after PM? What did Pac-Man do to them?
It helps to have some sliver of story there but the other arcade bangers didn’t have much story-wise either. As said before, those bangers also had blatant context about what’s going down. You knew what the enemies were, what they were probably doing, and what you had to do. In Pac-Man, you were just dropped in the mix and given the objective of survive and escape.
But your only means of survival was evading the Ghosts until you got a power pellet. In a way, PM was a proto-horror game that became a bit of a fantasy adventure once you could fight back. The game spawned a franchise which didn’t see any actual story until 1994’s Pac-Man 2 and 1995’s Pac-in-Time which had to get away from the maze and puzzle approach so that a story could be explored.
Perhaps that’s what it was the whole time: the original approach to PM simply didn’t lend itself to storylines and adventures.
Were you a big Pac-Man fan or were the games always a skip for you? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Staff Writer; M. Swift
This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.