Atari's Pac-Man flickering ghost problem

 

Pac-Man is the classic video game from the 80's. It's simple gameplay and graphics are a still beloved to this day. When it first came out in 1980 The game became immensely popular,It was fun, addicting, and a huge money maker and so because of it's success the video game companies of the 80's would be be missing out if Pac-Man wasn't available on on there game console. The problem with having so many different ports of the same game on different consoles is the issue of quality with each game. Each console would have different abilities, some were more powerful than others. Atari didn't let limitations of the 2600 system stop there plans for having pac-man on it though. Tod Frye was the man who coded the Atari port, he figured out what the game would have to be like by playing the original Pac-Man as a reference. After around six months The game was complete.

The game was met with criticism after it's release in 1982. A lot of people didn't like the look of the graphics, and it didn't seem to have the charm of original arcade game. The entire maze was changed and the circular pellets were changed to a rectangle shape. The sound effects were also not the same and more basic.

The Atari 2600 had many limitations so it was difficult to make it resemble the original, especially with the time it had to be made. Many of the changes were made so it could run on the system. 

A very noticeable thing that happens in the game is the constant flickering of the ghosts. This is one of the main issues with the game and makes it more difficult to play. The reason for this flickering mess is the result of having a limited amount of sprites able to be on the screen at a time. Essentially two ghost sprites were being moved to other locations to make it appear as of there were four ghosts, but it would only really be two on the screen at once.

Despite having its issues it actually became the best selling Atari game of all time. Something that made it different from the original that was positive is it had a 2 player mode.