Category: Tengen

The Game: As a round yellow creature consisting of a mouth and nothing else, you maneuver around a relatively simple maze, gobbling small dots (10 points) and evading four colorful monsters who can eat you on contact. In four corners of the screen, large flashing dots (50 points) enable you to turn the tables and eat the monsters for a brief period for an escalating score (200, 400, 800 and 1600 points). Periodically, assorted items appear near the center of the maze, and you can consume these for additional points as well. The monsters, once eaten, return to their home base in ghost form and return to chase you anew. If cleared of dots, the maze refills and the game starts again, but just a little bit faster… (Tengen, 1985)

Memories: You’ve gotta hand it to Atari – back in the day, they were the experts at exploiting a license until just about every possible option was exhausted. They were also quite adept at staying on the map – up to a point. Where this title might have been released by Atarisoft only a year or two earlier, Atari set up a new imprint – Tengen – to create and market games for the NES. By virtue of Atari’s existing license with Namco, Tengen threrefore produced the first NES port of Pac-Man, and Namco later released its own. (It’s worth noting that the Namco-Atari connection – forged in the late 70s when Namco distributed Atari arcade games in Japan – wasn’t history just yet; Atari later handled the American release of Namco’s Pac-Mania coin-op.) [read more]