on super pac-man

Thinking about the game "Super Pac-Man"... a bizarre, playful, abstract, convoluted, artistic mess of a sequel.

Most notably, alongside the normal power pellets that turn the ghosts blue and let you eat them, there are green super pellets... when you eat those Pac-Man doubles in size and can bypass the locked gates, while the ghosts stretch and squash and can be passed by unharmed.

I never realized that that was supposed to represent Super Pac-Man taking to the sky until I read it somewhere. The game doesn't doesn't have a lot of internal consistency about that; the gates can be flown over but the walls still confine movement, ghosts I guess are also being flown over but if you combine the flight with a normal power pellet they will be eaten (Super Pac-Man swoops down just to gobble them up, maybe? Doesn't seem extremely heroic) Similarly, I have trouble seeing the squish and stretch of the ghosts as a crude form of "perspective" from Super Pac-Man's aerial view... to me it all felt more like a big drug trip, with the ghosts just freaking out over this giant Pac-Man.

When you combine all that with the way each maze is full of items rather than the abstract dot pellets of the original... its status as the "truer" sequel (i.e. designed by the original creator Toru Iwatani) than the more subdued Ms. Pac-Man (which came out earlier the same year) is really something. Especially since the original Pac-Man was so beautifully minimalistic, and in fact they left Pac-Man abstract on purpose - as Iwatani says

There was the temptation to make the Pac Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it.

(That quote from an interview with him in "Programmers at Work", now available online)

Here's a good video going more into the history of it: At around 9 minutes in it gets into the intermission screens, which kind of match the abstract, artistic vibe of it all, playing with visual size and scale with narrative as more of an after thought. (I guess that reflects the original's approach, though Ms. Pac-Man told more of a story.)