![]() ![]() That would give Crazy Otto the potential for gameplay longevity that Pac-Man never had. ![]() With its new mazes and its refined monster AI, Crazy Otto aimed to overcome the patterns that Pac-Man players memorized to play the game perfectly on a single quarter. The pretzel bonus fruit was because Kevin Curran really loved pretzels. The two cherries is not trademarked because everybody uses that same two cherries image on every slot machine game. ![]() Golson: With the fruit design, the thought was, again, we were trying to be careful to not infringe on the other guys’ trademarks, and if they had a particular character that was recognizable like Pac-Man and the monsters and the Galaxian ship, well, we’re not going to use that. Macrae: Once we started the fruit moving, it became really fun to try to catch it. We said, “Well, if the hardware allows us to move it around, why don’t we move it around?’ In Pac-Man, they never moved the fruit around. There’s the four monsters, then Pac-Man, and then the bonus fruit. Golson: We had the idea to move the fruits around the maze because the hardware allows you to have six moving objects. Macrae: As we strived to look for more interesting improvements, at some point it was mentioned that we could have the fruit move. It was basically boy meets girl, and they chase each other, and then they find true love. That’s where I thought of the three animations. It was a long drive, and I’m in the car with my wife, and just thinking. I remember driving to a friend’s wedding. Horowitz: Then I did the intermission animations. Golson: I remember Chris on the piano there at the house figuring out the music for the attract mode and for all of the intermissions for all the cartoons. I did all the sound effects for the whole game. Pac man anniversary generator#Reverse-engineering the sound generator was pretty much impossible, but I just played around, substituting in values trying to get a feel for what changed if I put a 6E here instead of a 24. The first thing I did was work on sounds. “It was basically boy meets girl, and they chase each other, and then they find true love.” I knew nothing about microprocessors, or video, or anything. Doug said he’d be able to pay me no salary, but my wife made enough to support us.īy the time I joined, they had already made the mazes. Horowitz: I, unlike everyone else at GCC, actually graduated from college in 1979. We kept playing with them until we liked them. They were originally designed on graph paper, then implemented and tried out. It took a good bit of time to create interesting ones that would be challenging for people and not have the monsters get trapped or stuck. Macrae: The maze design was being done carefully to help prevent areas where you could get dead spots and hide from the monsters. Living and working in close but comfortable quarters in the relative isolation of a house up a wooded hill in Wayland, the young crew set out to implement its planned improvements to Pac-Man. Doug was married, but he was there pretty much all the time. Golson: I remember times where I’d come downstairs in my bathrobe, but that’s what we did. The other guys, they’d come down at like 10 or 11 in their pajamas, go have breakfast, then see how I was doing. Horowitz: I would just come in, park myself at my emulator, and start coding. Steve Golson at a TRS-80 Model II computer during Super Missile Attack’s development. The problem became if a game lasted longer than three minutes, the quarter count would go down, or if it wasn’t being played 17 hours a day because people didn’t like it as much, and were not standing in line to play it, the quarters went down. If you do the math on that, that’s one quarter every three minutes on 17 hours a day. Macrae: When we first got them, our Missile Command games on the MIT campus were pulling in roughly $600 a week. And their thinking gravitated to Atari’s Missile Command, one of the most popular games of the early 1980s. So they did what any clever MIT student would do in that situation: confront the problem with mathematical precision. As arcade operators themselves, they had a direct financial stake in making the games more interesting. Pac man anniversary series#Macrae and Curran’s arcade route–a series of machines they owned and operated both for their own profit and for the benefit of students–quickly expanded to three dorms, but they soon had trouble with declining revenues as people began to master the games. Kevin Curran (left) and Doug Macrae during the development of Super Missile Command Steve Golson is in the background at the computer. ![]()
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