![]() He perhaps surmises that if he eats enough, in other words buys enough industrially produced goods – he will attain … perfect roundness. “With his obsessively gaping maw, he clearly only wants one thing: to feel whole, at peace with himself. “He is the pure consumer,” wrote Poole in Trigger Happy. This ties in with another interpretation of Pac-Man as the ultimate modern shopper, trapped in a cycle of meaningless consumption and endless binging on electronic treats in a sterile technological landscape. Similarly, comic writer Zach Weiner, has pictured the game as a sort of terrifying Kafka-esque nightmare, in which a man wakes up to find he has been reduced to a living mouth that must consume to survive. Player power is only ever fleeting, and the monsters always come back.Įlsewhere, in his essay on the game, Dots, Fruit, Speed and Pills: The Happy Consciousness of Pac-Man, researcher Alex Wade draws comparisons between Pac-Man’s inescapable maze and the Labyrinths imagined by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges – the exits are just entrances to other parts of the whole. As in the Resident Evil titles, ammunition (in the form of power pills) is in short supply, and only has a temporary effect on monsters. It is, after all, about being trapped in a claustrophobic location, desperately attempting to stay alive while being relentlessly tracked by supernatural enemies. In his book Trigger Happy, writer and gamer Steven Poole saw Pac-Man as a precursor to the “survival horror” genre of games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Madness of Mission 6 – a Pac-Man true story by Travis Pitts “If Pac-Man had affected us as kids,” he said, “We’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” ![]() More well-known perhaps is Marcus Brigstocke’s oblique comparison between Namco’s game and the rise of the ecstasy-fuelled club culture. When Martin Amis wrote his now fabled book on arcade games, Invasion of the Space Invaders, his thoughts on Pac-Man largely concerned its enslaving properties: “I have seen bloodstains on the PacMan joystick I know a young actress with a case of PacMan Hand so severe that her index finger looked like a section of blood pudding – yet still she played, and played through her tears of pain.” When you clear a maze, another one appears and you continue munching, driven by the “wacka wacka” sound effects. If you’re good at it, Pac-Man ostensibly never ends. While most players see a cute character chugging around a maze gobbling pills and running away from cute ghosties, others build a more sinister narrative.įor some cultural commentators the sheer compulsion of the game, its almost narcotic effect, is the darkness at its heart. But then you look a little closer, and there’s something … dark.
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