ub-SESSED: infatuations in the age of attention deficiency: Head Games

This is one of the more random posts I have done, but I saw one of these pictures and it kind of spiraled out of control. Let’s just file this under the “attention deficit” part of my blog name, shall we. So here it is… my post on PacMan!:

Freshly hatched PacMan

We musn’t forget classy ole Mrs. PacMan, either

A perfectly pickled PacMan. Check here for more “real” video game characters from Kalapusa

“PacMan’s skeleton” by Le Gentil Garçon

Interesting facts (to me, at least):

the nicknames of the ghosts in Japan are: Macky, Micky, Mucky and Mocky. In America they are: Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde (We get it, Clyde, you’re the outsider. Get over it!)
I used to play this game all the time when I would visit my grandparents in Kilgore. There was a sea food restaurant in the next town over, Longview, and there would often be extreeemely long waiting times—at least, that’s how it seemed to me at the time. Johnny Casey’s is an old school/white table clothes/90 year old playing some jazz piano/etc kind of a place but for some reason they had this PacMan machine, which always seemed anachronous to me in some way. Oh well, it always helped the time pass by a little more quickly.
Apparently there is a programming glitch that makes the game unwinnable:

Pac-Man supposedly has no ending—as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to continue playing indefinitely. However, this is rendered impossible by a bug. Normally, no more than seven fruits are displayed on the side of the screen at any one time, but when the internal level counter (stored in a single byte) reaches 255, the subroutine erroneously causes this value to "roll over" to zero before drawing the fruit. This causes the routine to attempt to draw 256 fruits, which corrupts the bottom of the screen and the whole right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making the level unwinnable. However, through additional analysis, it has been revealed what happens should the 256th level be cleared - the fruits and intermissions would restart from level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages. ~ from Wikipedia

Wah wah!