Pac-Man Plus



The height of Pac-Man's popularity introduced a new wave of arcade bootlegging, where unauthorized copies of Pac-Man were manufactured at a tremendous rate to illegally cash in on the fad. While many bootlegs were carbon copies of the original, some bootlegs (such as Hanglyman and New Puck-X) actually modified the game to introduce some new wrinkles in an effort to make it more interesting and attract expert players who wanted a new challenge.

While Bally Midway proceeded with the manufacturing of Ms. Pac-Man against Namco's wishes, they also sought to stem the flow of bootlegs by producing an officially licensed upgrade to Pac-Man, which they named Pac-Man Plus. As far as Namco was concerned, Super Pac-Man was the true sequel to Pac-Man, and this upgrade was also unauthorized. Nevertheless, Midway proceeded to sell Pac-Man Plus to feed the demand in the U.S. for more Pac-Man products, as Super Pac-Man wasn't performing as well as Midway hoped.

The changes to Pac-Man Plus range from drastic to subtle, and are all detailed below. Since Pac-Man Plus was merely seen as a stop-gap solution to the bootleg arcade problem, and Ms. Pac-Man gained in popularity by the time Plus was released, it wasn't seriously considered for home conversion. No official conversions were made around that time. More recently, homebrew programmers have released conversions of older Atari games in to Pac-Man Plus. It was also included in Jakks Pacific's 2006 Super Pac-Man TV game.

Changes from Pac-Man
The basic rules of Pac-Man are unchanged. You must complete eat stage by consuming every dot and power pill on the screen. You lose a life by touching a ghost, but you can consume them for a brief period of time after you eat a power pill. Here are a list of the changes.
 * The maze color has been changed from blue to aqua-green.
 * When the ghosts turn blue, they shrink and a green flag appears above their head until they return to normal.
 * The majority of the bonus items have changed (see the table below.)
 * When Pac-Man eats a power pellet, one of the following things may randomly occur:
 * All four ghosts will turn blue as expected.
 * Only three of the ghosts will turn blue, while the fourth remains unaffected, although it will reverse direction.
 * The maze will turn invisible, although the dots will remain visible until the power pill wears off.
 * The maze and all remaining dots will turn invisible until the power pill wears off.
 * The blue ghosts will become invisible, but will become visible again when they begin to flash white.
 * Upon eating one of the bonus items, the ghosts will turn blue, just as if you had eaten a power pill. They will also turn invisible for a short period of time before flashing blue and white.  Unlike eating a power pill, the first ghost eaten is worth 400, and then each consecutive ghost is worth 800, 1600, and 3200 for the fourth and final ghost.  Scoring is normal (200 ~ 1600) if you've eaten a power pill.

Arcade patterns
While dedicated patterns for Pac-Man Plus machines are rare, some do exist. Due to the random nature of the ghosts' behavior once a bonus item is eaten, most patterns will forego one or both of the bonus items. Examples of these patterns can be found on the Arcade patterns page.

Atari 2600
AtariAge.com forum member PacManPlus is a programmer who is largely responsible for converting many versions of Pac-Man on various Atari platforms in to Pac-Man Plus. In this case, he took Rob Kudla's Ms. Pac-Man hack known as Mr. Pac-Man, and further hacked it into Pac-Man Plus. Meamwhile, forum member Nukey Shay has been diligently hacking the core of Ebivision's Pesco ROM for the 2600 in to Pac-Man, and added the variations contained in Pac-Man Plus (as well as Hanglyman) in to the program.

Atari 5200
PacManPlus took the well received conversion of Pac-Man for the Atari 5200 (and the Atari home computers) and hacked it in to Pac-Man Plus with a great deal of success.

Atari 7800
Just to complete the trilogy of systems, PacManPlus took the Ms. Pac-Man ROM for the 7800 and first successfully converted it into Pac-Man, and then took it one step further and made Pac-Man Plus.