Memory Card 1 block
Analog Control Compatible
Vibration Function Compatible
Screenshots & Art
Overview:
PAC-MAN IS BACK!
It's PAC-MAN's 20th anniversary,
but not everyone is celebrating. The Villainous Toc-Man has
imprisoned Pac-Man's family and friends on Ghost Island! Grab a
power pellet and start chomping! It's up to video game history's
favorite hero to save the day! All new abilities! Pac-Man still
eats dots and chomps ghosts, but now he also jumps, bounces,
revs and swims.
Experience the challenge of the original Pac-Man in over thirty
all-new 3-D pac-mazes!
Feeling nostalgic? Chomp ghosts the old-fashioned way! The
original arcade version of Pac-Man game is included!
A brand new world! Over twenty levels of all-new 3-D platform
style gameplay!
DEVELOPER INTERVIEW4
Interview with
Jesse Taylor, Director Namco R&D: Would you consider Pac-Man World the PS1 game that you are
most proud of developing?
I've developed lots of games over the years, and each is special
to me. Pac-Man World was the most fun and challenging PS1
project I had.
What was most
challenging about developing Pac-Man World?
I would say it was modernizing Pac-Man into the world of 3D
platform action 3D without abandoning the core concepts of the
original game. We wanted the game to be playable by the core
gamer audience at that time, but we also wanted the game to be
familiar and accessible to an older generation of casual game
players who remember Pac-Man from their childhood. So the
challenge was to keep the game simple and accessible to a more
casual audience while introducing some new mechanics that would
appeal to the audience at that time.
Did Namco Japan
HQ give the US team freedom to develop Pac-Man World or did they
make suggestions on what they wanted to see?
Yes, actually the Japanese parent company was very easy to work
with. I think that was due in part to the way the parent company
viewed Pac-Man at that time and the development strategy of the
US subsidiary. At that time Namco Ltd. developed games for the
Japanese market and sold the ones that appealed to Americans in
the US. At that particular time Namco viewed Pac-Man as a mostly
dormant franchise in Japan. They didn't think there would be a
large market for a new Pac-Man game in Japan. To them Pac-Man
was the company mascot and a cultural icon similar to Mickey
Mouse, but not an active game franchise. So when we proposed
making a Pac-Man game for the US, they thought it was a good
idea because we were developing a product for a different
territory with different tastes. They wanted the US development
team to focus on making games targeted at the tastes of the US
market. A game staring Pac-Man seemed like a good use of an
existing company IP that would never have been made in Japan
because the market wasn't there for it.
The only input we
received was related to the look of the characters. The founder
of Namco Mr. Nakamura personally had input regarding the look of
Pac-Man and the ghosts. Pac-Man was almost like a family member
to Nakamura-san, and he wanted to make sure he looked his best
at all times.
THE SECRET ORIGIN OF PAC-MAN WORLD4
"After most of team had been fired from Pac-Man Ghost Zone, we
started staffing the studio back up to create Pac-Man World. Our
new Studio director wanted the game to be set in the world of
Pac-Man, much like the arcade game Pac-Land. At that point, the
Ghost Lord was about the only thing we retained from the
original idea, so we came up with the story that he was sending
his ghosts out to capture pac-dots ala Mezmeron in the cartoon.
All of the game levels answered the question "where do pac-dots
come from?" The player started in the pac-dot forest, travelled
down a river to a pac-dot mill, rode a train loaded with pac-dots
to town where they would be processed in a factory (some of them
were irradiated into power-pellets) and then a showdown at the
Ghost Lord's haunted headquarters. However, our studio director
said "I have never seen trees look good in a game. Get rid of
the forest." So, we threw out the whole pac-dot story idea and
started over. The poor Ghost Lord didn't survive this transition
and was replaced by his arch-enemy Toc-Man (which is Namcot -
the original name of Namco - spelled backwards)
Toc-man had a very bizarre but funny origin. In reality, he was
a little ghost named Orson who was a childhood friend of
Pac-Man. Orson always failed where Pac-Man succeeded. The
failure drove Orson insane and he decided that if everyone loved
Pac-Man he would become Pac-Man and take his place. He wore a
mechanical Pac-Man suit and had an inflatable Ms. Pac-Man for a
wife (I'm not surprised that she never ended up in the game).
Orson then kidnapped all of Pac-Man's friends to be present at a
20th anniversary party in his (Toc-Man's) honor. Did I mention
that Pac-Man's friends were all characters from Namco's history?
Mappy, Valkyrie, Dig Dug and others were supposed to be in the
game, but they were dropped at the last minute in favor of
Pac-man's family instead. It's why Pooka is still in the game -
Pac-Man didn't have a big enough family for all of the levels!
Speaking of the levels, we took inspiration from games like
Crash Bandicoot and places like Disneyland. Pirates of the
Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, Tomorrowland. There's homages to
them all over that game. At this point we were more focused on
making exciting themed levels - it didn't matter if they made
much sense in context of the storyline. But there was one thing
I never liked in the game - the shooting. It just didn't feel
right for Pac-Man to shoot a projectile. We argued that Pac-Man
was never aggressive - he would only fight back after he had
eaten a power-pellet. We had many heated discussions but in the
end, the management wanted it in, so in it stayed. Overall, I'm
proud of my involvement in Pac-Man World, that the team was able
to re-energize such an iconic character and help continue his
gaming legacy."
WRITTEN BY: SCOTT ROGERS.
After deciding that game designers have more fun, Scott Rogers
embarked on a 16 year career creating exciting game designs for
a number of titles including Sony's GOD OF WAR, Capcom's MAXIMO:
GHOSTS TO GLORY and its sequel MAXIMO VS. ARMY OF ZIN and
Namco's PAC-MAN WORLD. He is currently a Creative Manager at THQ
on many titles including DRAWN TO LIFE and DARKSIDERS.
POST MORTEM4
Blinky, Pinky, Inky,
Clyde, and Weezie. Wait a second, who the heck is Weezie? I'm
Weezie, Jason Weesner, the fifth ghost in Pac-Man World 20th
Anniversary who doesn't appear in the credits, but who's work
still remains in the first two worlds (the Pirate and Ruins
levels) and a lot of the game mechanics (the Namco character
cameos, slot machine, and the King Galaxian to name a few). When
I started at Namco on what was originally known as Pac-Man Ghost
Zone, I was excited not only to work for one of my favorite
Japanese publishers, but also to work on bringing a classic
arcade superstar to the home consoles in a character-based game.
Great videogame characters strike a careful balance between
playability (controls, responsiveness, player mechanics, etc.)
and presentation (appearance, back story, emotions, etc.). It's
far too easy for a rift to occur between the two aspects which
can create an unplayable and / or unlikable character. Coming
onto the Pac-Man Ghost Zone team, I knew a few things about
Pac-Man that I found endearing and compelling: Pac-Man likes to
eat, he's mostly afraid of ghosts, he's got a hot wife, and he
lives in a maze. Additionally, he's as well-known as Mickey
Mouse or Mario! Even to this day, I'd never started a project
with such a strong foundation to build great gameplay and
expectations on top of! These were the qualities I established
as my pillars for designing the game.
Even though the original Pac-Man is an elegantly simple game,
just about everybody at Namco Hometek had a different idea of
what Pac-Man would be like as a platformer character. There were
a few good decisions made towards the start of the project to
help solve this. New abilities that complimented both his
appearance and basic gameplay mechanics were added. These
additions felt natural to the character and worked especially
well in concert with some of the level layouts and other
mechanics:
• The Dot Suck: Scott Rogers was one of the other designers on
the project who survived from the original Ghost Zone team. He
listened to his music too loud, had an obsessive love of
Disneyland, and came up with some of our best game mechanics.
One of these was the Dot Suck which enabled Pac-Man to greedily
eat chains of pellets and pull off cool acrobatics in the
process.
• The Rev-Roll: one of the cool things about a 3D Pac-Man was
the presentation of the character as an actual sphere
(ironically, on the tech end, the character was a flat sprite
with polygonal arms and legs). The Rev-Roll allowed Pac-Man to
charge up and become a fast-moving ball similar to Metroid's
Morph Ball. Our creative director designed a clever Rev-Roll pad
mechanic which Pac-Man could use as either a self-powered
elevator or a timed lock mechanic to open doors.
• The Butt-Bounce: the Butt-Bounce is an age-old game mechanic
that's been used to death in just about every platformer ever
made. The Pac-Man version was nice because, again, it emphasized
the spherical appearance of the character and made the move more
bouncy like a basketball.
There were also some really bad decisions made:
• Addition of non-ghost enemies: a phenomenal amount of time was
wasted on the design and implementation of generic enemies that
did not fit with the standard Pac-Man enemy paradigm (eating
power pellets to turn the tables). This broke one of the
original design pillars and added nothing to the game.
• The Pac-Dot attack: this mechanic came about as the result of
a fair, but unnecessary question, "what does Pac-Man do with all
those pellets he eats?" In the case of Pac-Man Ghost Zone,
the original game, pellets act as a key mechanism that allows the player to unlock
the next level. Since Ghost Zone didn't take place in a
fixed-screen maze, this wasn't as feasible, so the Pac-Dot
attack was added despite the loud protests of the design
department. Pac-Man uses power pellets to kill enemies, not a
pellet gun!! A better solution would have been to offer the
player a self-activated power pellet for every 25 pellets eaten.
This would've fit better with the character.
• Generally hasty decisions about Pac-Man's abilities hampered
the ability to create more compelling level designs based on his
game mechanics. A flavor-of-the-month mentality in relation to
other successful games (like Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64)
brought incongruent elements into the design mix. On many
occasions, poor communication led to decisions that broke months
of work. In one case, our manager arbitrarily changed the jump
distance and broke all the planned jumps for the entire game!
I still have good relationships with a lot of the people I
worked with, but there will always be that nagging question in
the back of my mind, "should I have stayed to finish the
project?" In the case of Pac-Man World, I resigned because I
felt that the project's direction was compromising an iconic
character that I held near and dear to my heart. It was a very
difficult decision for me to leave the project, but I came to
the realization that I loved the character more than I loved the
project or the company. The day after I gave my two-week notice,
on a gloomy Wintery Wednesday, my belongings were boxed up when
I got back from lunch and a security guard waited to escort me
outside.
When the PlayStation Museum asked me to write a post mortem, I
knew I had a few things I had to get off my chest and I guess
they're out now. I'd also like to take the opportunity to
remember some of the other hard working folk who weren't
credited: Heather Capelli
(art direction, management, and scheduling), Nicole Allen
(animation), Myra (level artist), Dimitri (animation), Olga
(prop artist), Jill (our wonderful receptionist), and everybody
on the original Ghost Zone team. I'm sorry I don't remember
everybody's full names!
WRITTEN BY: JASON WEESNERhas been
making games since he was 10 years old. The first game he
designed and programmed was a Qbert clone for his Apple II+
which was sold (given to anybody interested) at a local hobby
shop. He also developed a lot of Ultima type RPG's which his Mum
and Dad were very impressed by. These days, he's a senior 'jack
of all trades' game designer with credits on numerous titles
ranging from the Sega Genesis Little Mermaid all the way to Tomb
Raider Underworld.
EGM article
on the sounds of Pac-Man
The team was
given a Pirate bobblehead
after finishing the first playable (P1)
