A to Z Challenge: Pac-Man & Pitfall

 There were a few Ps to choose from here (including the original Atari game Pong) but I figure I have to do the classic Pac-Man.  While Mario and Sonic became icons of the industry, Pac-Man was there first.  He had games, toys, a TV show, crappy vitamins, and even a song!

If you've never played, the concept is simple but kinda silly.  You control Pac-Man, the mostly yellow circular dude who goes around the board chomping up pellets.  He's chased by 4 ghosts:  Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.  There are 4 super pellets, one in each corner, where Pac can become invincible for a limited time.  Then he can eat the ghosts, who go to the center of the board until they respawn.  Sometimes a fruit pops up in the middle for bonus points.  

You can get extra lives so you can keep going for a long time.  There is in theory an end, but I'm not sure how many actually made it that far.  

After Pac-Man came Ms. Pac-Man that introduced his girlfriend.  It was pretty much the same game only she had a pink bow!  Then there was Super Pac-Man where he turned into a giant Pac-Man.  And later some spin-off games like Pac-Man Land that I think were more in response to games like Super Mario Bros.

It started in arcades and the 2600 and has been on other platforms.  Google even replaced the "doodle" once with a Pac-Man game you could play.  The Atari 2600 version was apparently so bad that it helped to drive a video game market crash in 1983 along with other junk like ET.  The video game market remained depressed for a couple of years, until the NES came along.

In the book version of Ready Player One, Parsifal plays an entire game on one quarter in an arcade and wins a special token to give him an extra life in the Oasis later on.  So the game remains a part of pop culture today.

I also decided to talk about Pitfall.  The game was one of those licensed games not by Atari for the 2600 and probably also an arcade version too.

You play as Pitfall Harry, who's sort of an Indiana Jones character.  You have to go through the jungle, avoid deadly animals and traps.  Sometimes you could grab a vine to swing over water hazards or bogs, in which case the game would make sort of a Tarzan yell.  Sometimes you had to go underground into tunnels.  The tunnels might then be bricked up so you'd have to go back to the surface.

There were different things to find, though I forget what the ultimate goal was.  Or if there even was an ultimate goal.  It might have simply been one of those games that just went on and on forever until you died, got tired of playing, or the game/power failed since there was no saving anything for the Atari 2600.

There was I think a sequel and some revivals or reboots or whatever for other consoles and PC/Mac.  Maybe you can even get it on your phone now.  It seems like the kind of game they could make a movie for but maybe the similarity with Indiana Jones makes that too difficult.