The Game: You’re in charge of a getaway car loaded with crafty criminals. Your job is to sneak the crooks around the maze, one at a time, avoid four colorful cops who are hot on your trail, and grab all the dough – and, of course, to escape so you can steal again another day. (Mattel [under license from Data East], 1982)
Memories: A fine translation of Data East’s arcade game, this cartridge – one of the earliest examples of a licensed coin-op title from Mattel – is let down by the maddening control problems of the dreaded disc controller. But audiovisually speaking, it was as close as one could get to the original, so I do have to award it some points there.
Lock ‘N’ Chase also served as an unexpected calling card for its designer, who was later hired away by Atari…to design games for the Intellivision to be released under 
the “Atarisoft” label. Since Lock ‘N’ Chase was, at the very least, an homage to Pac-Man (and I’m trying to be charitable in my choice of words there), it’s somehow appropriate that the programmer who ported Lock ‘N’ Chase to Intellivision later did the same for Pac-Man. Both do their source material proud.
