Professor Pac-Man

Professor Pac-Man is a quiz arcade game that was released by Bally Midway in 1983. Like Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Baby Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man before it, it had been created without the authorization of Namco, the original creators of the series. This instalment did not fare very well in the arcades, mainly due to its slow pace and abandonment of the famous maze-based gameplay which had made all the previous titles in the series (both Japanese and American) so popular. It was written in the FORTH programming language, and was the last of only 7 games from Bally Midway Mfg to run on their Astrocade hardware.

Bally Midway had originally planned to release three different versions of their quiz game: Family (for younger players), Public (for bars), and Prizes (for casinos). They had also planned to release software revisions at quarterly intervals to keep people from memorizing the answers. Unfortunately for them, however, the game was almost an immediate flop and most operators only had it hanging around for as long as it took to get it shipped back to the distributor. Only 400 cabinets were ever made, all the "Public" variety; approximately 300 of them were shipped back to the manufacturer and converted to Pac-Land cabinets the following year, which is why it was not uncommon to see a Pac-Land cabinet with Professor Pac-Man sideart in the mid-1980s. It is thought that only a very small number of Professor Pac-Man cabinets still survive today, possibly only in the double-figures.