Retro Gaming Australia

Ontario-based film company Fuel has obtained permission from the Alamogordo’s City Commission allowing them access to the city’s landfill for a period of six months. The reason? The company wishes to make a documentary on the excavation of of millions of unsold Atari 2600 cartridges which were said to have been buried there.

For those who don’t know, Atari was stuck with millions of unsold copies of games such as Pac-Man and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial after the 1982 holiday season. The company had foolishly believed that people would buy Atari 2600s solely for these games, and produced more copies of the games than there were 2600 systems in households. These excess copies were said to have been buried in a New Mexico landfill in September 1983.

Susie Galea, the Almogordo city mayor seems to approve of the project, stating “I hope more people find out about Alamogordo through this opportunity that we have to unearth the Atari games in the landfill.”

The team at Steelhouse Productions has been working on this short film about Pac-Man for a year. They call it “the greatest 80s movie that never happened”.

Basically the 10-minute or so film tries to make sense of how something like Pac-Man could exist in the real world. According to the film’s website, they wanted to know “What the heck is a Pac-Man? What are the ghosts? What and/or where is this blinking blue maze? And how exactly can a hungry yellow ball exit on the left side of the screen, and re-appear again on the right?”

It’s neat, if a bit silly.

People are not kidding when they say that Pac-Man is on every system under the sun. The Game Boy version isn’t the best – the scrolling screen makes proceedings a little more annoying than they should be, but it could be a lot worse.

Ms Pac-Man is best Pac-Man (behind Championship Edition DX, that is)

Ms. Pac-Man is the follow up to the smash hit Pac-Man. It was not actually designed by Namco in Japan, but by a couple of young entrepreneurs in America running a company called General Computer Corp. which designed conversion kits for existing games. The Atari 2600 version, which this ad is for, is way way way better than the original port of Pac-Man.