Ms. Pac-Man



When Pac-Man was still hot in the arcades, a small company known as GCC, or General Computing Corp., was in the business of making arcade "enhancements" which were essentially small hacks designed to make certain games more appealing. GCC was known for an add on that they sold for Atari's Missile Command when they sat down to design a hack for Pac-Man. They surprised themselves with the quality of the hack, which they had entitled "Crazy Otto" and pitched the idea to Midway Games.

Midway was hungry to cash in on the Pac-Man phenomenon that was occuring at the time, and Namco's own sequel to Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, was still a few months out of development, so they bought the rights to "Crazy Otto" and renamed it Ms. Pac-Man in an effort to entice more females to play arcade games.

Ms. Pac-Man expands on Pac-Man in the following ways. Instead of one static blue-on-black maze, there are now four multi-colored mazes to complete. Instead of the fruit appearing stationary below the ghost pen, it now bounces in through a tunnel, takes a few laps around the pen, and bounces back out if not eaten. Instead of just one escape tunnel, there are (in all but one of the mazes) two sets of tunnels. And lastly, Ms. Pac-Man introduces an element of randomness to the ghosts' behavior which eliminated the effectiveness of patterns that crippled the earning power of Pac-Man, and makes Ms. Pac-Man much more of a game of skill then memorization.

Story
Like Pac-Man, there really is no story element per se, but the intermissions that you are treated to tell the story of how Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man meet, fall in love, and have a child together (dropped off by a passing stork.)

How to play

 * Controls & Characters
 * Maze Variations
 * Home Version Comparisons

Box artwork
Ms. Pac-Man has been released on many different systems, and has accumulated a wide range of box artwork, some of which is displayed below.

Controls & Characters &gt;&gt;