Classic Game Postmortem: Ms. Pac-Man

[Music] good afternoon Wow I'm Steve Golson and you're all here to hear about MS pacman and here in the 21st century they tell me we have to turn off our phones so I'm say Shane how does that work again so turn off your phone please and make it quiet that's good so let's get started thank you for being here so Who am I so I'm Steve Golson and a very long time ago I did game design and so I'm here to give you whatever pearls of wisdom you might deign to take who are you so let's ask questions so who has played MS pac-man on an actual arcade machine Oh awesome ok ok who's played it in an actual arcade this is awesome all right all right all right who remembers playing it

when it first came out ok we're all over 50 right am i right and then lastly do we have any any hardware people in the room hardware designers yeah not so many yeah long ago it would have been a lot of you but that's ok so they didn't talk about hardware and you just use software people just nod your heads ok all right um so what was general computer general computer was a company 35 years ago and I'll talk a little bit about how it came to be we did a tremendous amount of game design work in the early 80s this is 1981 through 1984 or so and why it matters is because games are just insanely amounts of fun and it was fun designing them back then and it's fun doing it today so I'm just going to try and give you a little bit of a flavor of what it was and talk specifically about about Ms pac-man but to talk about miss pac-man I have to give you a little more little more history so this all goes

back to MIT any MIT people here yeah ok in 1978 and there are two students in this dormitory where I lived Doug MacRay and Kevin Kern and they started up a partnership the two of them to do pinball games and video games in our dormitory long story about how that came about but the two of them performed this partnership and hey we're going to run pinball games and and run them and they they eventually spread out into three different dorms and had like over 20 machines it was very successful running games because you had this captive audience of MIT students who this was one of the few ways you could relax was to go and play video games and pinball games so they came up to speed on how do you maintain these games and how do you keep them operating and how do you how do you make money at it well one of the things that was common back then were what were called speed-up kits and the philosophy behind a speed-up kit

is what you need to understand the dynamics of the arcade industry is that you'd bring out a new game and it costs $2,000 $2,500 you'd put it in your arcade or put it out on on play and you'd get great revenues for a while and then the revenues would drop off your coin drop would reduce as we say and what's wrong well the players have gotten really good at the game they figured out how to beat the game and they would play for longer and longer and longer but there's nothing physically wrong with the Machine the display is fine the controls are fine cabinets fine they're learning how to beat the software so these kits started being created and sold and they were initially called speed-up kits and the reason they were called speed-up kits was because really the first one came for asteroids very popular game from Atari 1979 who's played asteroids an actual asteroids machine right it's vector driven if you all want to have a

good time go behind the back of the asteroids machine and crank up the brightness anyone ever done that because then you can watch how it draws the the characters on the screen it's very cool to see the way asteroids works is it's it's interrupt-driven is every four milliseconds the processor gets interrupted boom it wakes up scans the controls draws the screen goes back to sleep and it waits for the next interrupt so some smart hardware guy said all I have to do is speed up that tick and the game will run faster hence speed up kit now everybody likes this the the game owner likes it because he's making more money the players actually like it because they have more of a challenge here's a asteroids speed-up kit this is actually on my asteroids that I have in my basement now notice this is a complete hardware modification there's no no software has been harmed in the making of this speed-up kit it's all

hardware which the arcade owners understood they understood hardware okay okay what's the next game Galaxian very popular game now Galaxian speed-up kit or modification kit you actually modified this software but you didn't have to understand very much it's a table driven game so if you found the tables in ROM you if you found the single byte that controlled how many attacking characters there are on the first wave and you change that table while you modified the game and you it got harder it got better and so these super Galaxian kits became about oh oh and be sure and change the prompt so it doesn't say Galaxian anymore says some other game you name you've come up with so so this would be sold as a complete new ROM set for the game even though you've only changed a few percent of the code maybe 10% the only way you could provide this to the end user is by selling them a complete new set of roms

can anyone tell me why that's a problem well it's a problem because of copyright because you're copying most of the codes that's one problem number two is you're selling them a lot of expensive roms when you only need to sell them a few right and number three and the biggest problem is anybody who knows how to copy a ROM can now copy your kit that's the worst problem of all so alright so what are we going to do oh pac-man pac-man very similar to Galaxian the maze is a table in ROM and so if you go in and change the characters of the table you can change the maze and also the graphics roms are separate little roms if you go in and change them you change the characters of the game and there were a number of kits for pac-man that put in new mazes and put in new characters and so cool game everything else stayed the same Missile Command Missile Command was really popular at MIT no nuclear war explosions it's

pretty cool and Doug and Kevin had three Missile Command games I mean they're like sophomores you know this is this is early in their career and but Missile Command and the same phenomenon happened with Missile Command was that lots of revenue and then boom the revenue drops off as the players got good at it so Doug and Kevin start looking around who's got a speed up kit who's got an enhancement kit for Missile Command nobody well it was a very sophisticated game it was bitmap um there were no characters in ROM because everything's drawn one pixel at a time so they're they're annoyed oh geez what are we going to do we can't find a kid in it and then suddenly they realized hey we go to MIT I bet we could write a kit so general computer started up during spring break 1981 much more fun writing game software

than going to the beach so and we couldn't come up the name general computer where did that come we couldn't think of a better name it seemed generic enough and it sounded really large you know General Motors General Electric General Foods general computer hey sure so that's the name in it and it and it's stuck so we started working on what we called super missile attack as an enhancement kit and so there was a handful of us who were living in a town house outside in Brookline across from MIT all students and started in as I said Spring Break of 1981 mid-march we're lucky you have any photos at all so I'm Chris Road who is this will be annoyed when he sees this but that's okay so you can see a Missile Command cabinet you can see Chris playing and then to the left there you see this sort of beige thing with a screen that's a gen

red process microprocessor emulator cost about twenty five thousand dollars and that's what we used to to do our development of super missile attack talk a little more about that here's another photo in the back there you can see the trs-80 that we use to capture the the software that's Kevin Kern on the left and that's Doug MacRay taking a nap because we were getting about four hours of sleep a night you can also see the Daisy wheel printer who's even do you know what a daisy wheel printer is Wow all my peeps in the audience here all right so how did this work so we had a microprocessor emulator that could disassemble the code because basically this is a reverse engineering problem right we have to understand how Missile Command works so that we can modify what we need to what we need to change and unfortunately the disassembly only would disassemble on the screen and you'd get

like 30 lines of code disassembled so how are we going to capture it well you would sit next to this jin rad with the trs-80 and type it in by hand what you saw on the screen workflow you think your workflows bad dude so so here's one of the sheets that we that we captured and kind of hard to see but down at the bottom this is page 55 I mean this is like these enormous huge thick thing that we typed in by hand but it helped you understand the game and then lots of hand written Scrolls on there about oh here's what's going on here is what's going on there we figured out how the game works how Missile Command worked figured out what the different ROM locations were memory locations and and then as we're doing our own development how did you do your character development well you got out a big piece of graph paper and you started but looking a little X's and O's on it to what's what's my new character going to look at right so bear with me we'll get to miss pac-man eventually but you need to understand that so

intellectual property so we were thinking about intellectual property how to protect their own and how to not infringe others so we wanted to avoid copyright infringement like the people doing the galaxians KITT would do trademark infringement so we did not call it missile command we called it super missile attack and we did not want somebody else ripping off what we were making so we made some clever hardware in there to make it difficult to copy this is the hardware I did the hardware design for this this is our little our little board and it would go this is from the manual for super missile attack so it plugs inside the Missile Command cabinet right so you'd sell this board to the arcade operator and there you would go so so there's 12 K bytes you know I was at that talk this morning the 30 year anniversary and they were making a big deal about hard disk hard disks we

didn't have any hard disks you know 12 K bytes wow that was a big game so anyhow so missile commands 12 K bytes that's what goes in those six empty sockets and then our four K bytes of code and then some magic circuitry in the middle one of those chips is what was called a pal chip programmable logic so you could customize it and you could blow the last fuse in such a way that someone could not copy it and so that was key to our anti copying people would not be able to you would have to be very sophisticated in order to do it and that's who we were trying to to deter and to to to even make that even more hard we said oh we're going to strip the markings off the PAL chip so people will not even know it's a pal and we wanted to make the markings GCC because that was our company name but the marking company didn't quite get it right and so they made it CG I don't know this is

important later so anyway hey that's me back when I had lots of hair sitting at the trs-80 and programming pals and what's really interesting about this is what was captured on the whiteboard in the back so there's a bunch of notes there but you can see our schedule so May 11th replay and play meter those are the two big industry magazines where our ad was going to run all right and so obviously on May 12th we're going to start getting phone calls for orders and our software freeze is not for a week later that's not the way it happens now is it no no no you're all done well before you start marketing your product so anyway and in fact that's exactly what happened here's our ad and it was a four-color full-page ad inside front cover not one of those little black and white classified ads like the other ones it's like oh no we're going full-bore for marketing we

had an 800 number it was great and we sold about a thousand units in two months so netted quarter-million dollars that's pretty good for a bunch of MIT dropouts which we it all dropped out by then you know much to our parents chagrin it's like hey dude I'm designed games this is like so much fun right so so who did that and so there were six of us who worked on that and designed super missile attack and boom off we go and this is just as just awesome I mean that arcade owners love this the players loved it we got calls from arcade owners just like players are coming in and saying do you have super missile attack and they're leaving when I don't have it so send me one of your kits awesome so a lot of word-of-mouth so so Atari Atari didn't take kindly to this they sued us for 15 million dollars

the complaints were a copyright infringement and false designation of origin and trademark infringement unfair competition that's my favorite right because Atari Ataris gross income the year before was fourteen hundred four hundred fifteen million dollars and they're going after a handful of dropouts it's like hey you can you're not scaring us we got nothing for you so an Atari Atari back then it's hard to imagine but today Atari was the high tech company if you were today to take Google+ Plus Microsoft Plus Sony Plus half the companies on the floor and put them all in one and that was Atari they were just high-flying high tech amazing so so they sued us and we go to court and we got a lot of press so press coverage hey no no coverage is bad right so so we got press coverage from Boston Globe and the first few

court appearances did not go well for us we got a restraining order this was our local hometown paper we had moved by now out into Wayland and and there's a photo from the paper that's Doug MacRay standing at our super missile attack that we had created for for the court so this happened in late July through August we're not backing down we're deposing ray Kassar at Atari and various engineers and Ataris like getting annoyed so naturally what do they do they hire us and they're like what do you guys want we're going to design games well why don't you design games for Atari why don't you drop your lawsuit so that's in fact what happened and they so they dropped their lawsuit with prejudice meaning they will never fall it and file it again we will stop making super missile attack yeah sure

okay all right and they're gonna pay us $50,000 a month to design games who found out years later that they thought we were just going to like take the money and run and just like go sit on a beach no man we're going to design games for you so so we did I known that third bullet point that's the key one we will not market enhancement kits without permission from the manufacturer this was the key thing that Atari wanted to avoid if they had lost the suit and it was proven legal that games could be modified by the end-user that would set a very bad precedent the legal protection for games at this time was very unsettled was there copyright protection for games for the audiovisual presentation it was not clear at all and so they did not want a precedent being set so make us make the lawsuit go away hire us we'll do games for them well meanwhile all summer long we've been working on another kit because right you know we got done with super

missile attack end of May 1st of June like what are we going to do next we're going to do another kit this one's working great how do you decide what to build what kind of a kit so super missile attack we're thinking maybe you get three to five percent of the installed base so you want to look for a game that has a big installed base you want to look for a game that it's obvious what you can do to to change it or maybe you just wholesale put a complete new game in the existing cabinet so we thought about this and we had a couple of ideas one was asteroids huge build of asteroids 70,000 of them in out there but pac-man pac-man was the hot new game in the u.s. in 1981 it was just peaking in popularity and so we knew we were going to hit the market at the right time with our kit because it was obvious there were problems with pac-man it was predictable play in fact there were these are these books right mastering pac-man and you know the video masters guide to pac-man that had all

the patterns in them for how to beat the game you could play pac-man forever so we're like oh we're clearly we know how we're going to do this we're going to we're going to kill the predictability so we started working on this in early June early mid June 1981 okay first thing that's from a Tektronix marketing just not us but we needed this this is the gen rad did not work with six with the z80 processor so we needed a different enhancement kit excuse me a different emulator so we got a Tektronix 85/50 z80 emulator uses 8-inch floppy disks and oh what we really loved was it it supported a line printer so we could do our disassembly and print it out online for who knows what a line printer is know yeah okay but hey eight inch floppies right held a megabyte it's pretty pretty awesome but so how did we go about reverse engineering again so here's another game we need to understand how pac-man works

so that we can modify it so what are your sources for your reverse engineering well we had we had the manuals so there's a little bit that tells you schematics because these were sold to arcade owners who have some knowledge to repair the game so you could figure out the address map you could figure out how the graphics hardware worked you could you could get a little bit of the game here's the basic pac-man hardware 16 K of code separate graphics roms 8k worth a fixed character play field and six moving characters what you would call today's sprites we call them stamps back then because we didn't know any better and you had four colors at a time actually only had three colors you had three colors and transparent so every every character is only three colors so here's the address map which actually I wrote panned route this figured it out from the schematics what else could we do we could look at the graphics roms and slowly piece them apart and figure

out how the graphics roms were encoded but the biggest thing was we could disassemble the code we could disassemble the entire thing all 16k bytes and understand print it out and so it comes out to be about 180 pages okay the annotated pac-man now this actually this actually was done this particular print out this was done by the jr. pac-man people that's a post-mortem for a different day but you can you can come up and see this and you can see all the handwritten notations and the pizza stains and the just wonderfulness of the annotated pac-man so we'll have some some show-and-tell afterwards all right there like that cool media all right so that's a Tim Hoskins

and Bruce Burns where the Junior pac-man guys and so that's that's their handiwork what else could we do so we could use the 85 50m you later system it's sort of like MAME and hardware right and you could do you could set breakpoints and return statements gee what does this do and I remember one cool thing we did right early on was we set some sort of a breakpoint that printed out on the line printer every time a particular routine got executed and that essentially put the game into slo-mo which was really cool because you could learn stuff about how the game works and here's an example you can see that pac-man actually skids around the corner a little bit okay watch watch them go around the corner you can see actually skids a little bit right so he can go faster than the monsters can as you go around corner so that was one thing we learned and then the other thing is the monsters look ahead watch he'll look before he

actually turns see and so you know so you're you're learning a little bit about how the monster AI works AI dat was 16 K like yeah okay so that was one thing that were able to do and then another cool thing we did was once we found the maze mazes was zero out the maze and that was really cool because you could watch the monster move where it wanted to go without the maze in the way I was very cool there's one particular mode that the monster gets in that that people now call scatter where it basically heads for its favorite corner and was very obvious when you set it up like this because there is no maze in the way you could just watch a digit just go straight out to where it was trying to get to and then there was another mode it would get into where it basically turned right every time and you would see it there in a little tight little turning turning turning so so you could see that and so you could what you can learn stuff about the game by

playing around with it using the using the emulation system so so what were we going to do to make to get rid of pac-man's problems for new mazes and we said okay we're not going to be constrained by memory space we're going to add more roms if we need to so we will add more mazes why just one maze we can will do for the big thing is to randomize the monster algorithms so that the pattern play will not work anymore right and the way we did this it is truly random what we did because there's a freerunning counter in the z80 microprocessor that was used for DRAM refresh remember DRAM refresh yeah so and you could access it from software and it made a really cool truly random counter and so we use that to drive the the algorithm and essentially what it did was each monster instead of going to a fixed corner it picked a random corner and that was enough randomization in the

algorithm to totally screw you over as a player the other thing other things we added the fruit bonus moves through the maze you had to chase it right and it moves through in a random path actually there were four paths pre-defined and it randomly picks one again truly randomly randomly picks one and that's the maze that's the path it takes going in and then it randomly picks one of the four for it to go out goes in goes around that the the center house then goes out we tried a bunch of other stuff that didn't work we thought about vertical tunnels you know there's horizontal tunnels in pac-man what about vertical tunnels that would be cool and it turned out that the the AI for the monsters it would never go through them so I said okay you know we're not going to do that we thought about things like oh what if the monstrous can travel through the wall sometimes and so you know things we tried but never never got far enough so that's what we we ended up with and then

a bunch of non gameplay features that we we added the new colors new sounds new music new animations what we would today we would call cutscenes but pac-man had them as well and we thought of our own - to put in and of course a different name for the main character because we're looking at trademark issues and and copyright issues we can't call a pac-man or super pac-man oh we'll call it crazy Otto so one of the things about the fruit bonus the first thing we noticed is that there's six the hardware supports six moving characters and in the pac-man hardware but the fruit never moves let's move it that's something cool is free in the hardware so we'll move it around the maze and the other thing is buried in the pac-man graphics ROM there's an explosion character okay we could use that so the first thought was let's have the fruit move through the maze and then explode if you haven't got it in time it blows up and we use

that for a while but then ended up with what we have now where it bounces in and it bounces out so the sounds in the path and then the the value that that funny diagonal number there because if you did the bonus when you eat the fruit if you did it the way pac-man did it it looked really ugly because it over wrote the maze to put the big 1,000 5,000 number on there so we came up with our own that's why it's sort of scrunched down like that maze design it's all on paper right so we still have all this but you could see the the we'll try this try this so there's several things we tried but basically if it worked okay yeah yeah stick with it move on to the next maze so we came up with four mazes so here's our four mazes all lined up together and the thought was so pac-man people are somewhat used to oh here's a

pac-man game that's in and modified it has a different maze and so they get started in our game and they play that first maze and they get through the first couple of racks and then WHAM yet another maze and I would just they'd be used to the first maze and then boom here's a totally different one and that lasts for a few racks and then boom another maze and then that lasts for a few and by the time you've gotten through the fourth maze I mean you're a really good player and so four seemed like a good number the music any any musicians music yeah so Chris Road did all the music for Miss pac-man and I loved his title for his the code there it says a sonata for unaccompanied video game and that's the only piece of music actually paper I mean he used it composed it at the piano at our house in Wayland and wrote it down I mean that's actually even the staffs are hand written on the piece of paper with his hand hand notations there so music the the game startup and three animations so

he wrote all the music for that and so we're talking about crazy Otto alright you ready here here's the first animation oh those is a track mode I'm sorry so this is an early attract mode and the names came from Phil caret who was a physics student at MIT and worked for us for the summer so hence the names Ayres Auto and there's the monsters so this is essentially a pac-man attract mode and we hacked it up really quickly as a demo just so that we could we could put it out on test for example and there's notice our logo gen comp general computer on there so this is our first our first shot at the attract mode but the other part of a track mode is the the fake Oh game and so we can watch auto play here this is again where you can see the randomness because some of the randomness is the the algorithm for how Auto moves during the fake game it's actually one of the monster algorithms repurposed and so you never know how

long he's going to play in the attract mode we always worried that he might actually complete the maze during the attract mode and rule what would happen in so so you can see Auto and you see the monsters and wow he's doing really well Oh Oh missed the missed the fruit and up he comes and you can see our new monster designs again was a trademark thing we want the monsters to look a little different and wow he's doing really well look at that's pretty good for randomness and finally yeah he dies and he spins around dead dead Auto okay so and here's a here's a detail of Auto so you can see he's actually got this sort of 3d he turns away from you and he turns toward you right is that cool yeah Auto so what else did we do so we did the the

cutscenes the animations and this was Mike Horowitz one of our developers who came up with the idea and and coated up the animation driver so they're obviously the red one is the female so all we did was you took the same character and used a different palette pick two different three colors and you try all the available palettes those are really ugly red ooh red looks good okay so we have the two of them and let's see animation number two with Chris's wonderful little ragtime tune Oh

well done well done Chris so actually very sophisticated sound synthesis in pac-man and so we had to learn how the pac-man music driver worked and put our own tables in there to drive the music so it's not even composing but again reverse engineering the music driver so that you can figure out how to do it and finally the final animation and little baby Otto there so that's how we know it's male/female right because they procreate there they have baby so anyway so this was a fun thing it breaks up the game it's it's fun it gives the the player a break a little bit and then you want to know is there an act for what's going to happen next as it drives the player to do more so character design well where the idea from Otto come from well partly it came from if you look at

the side of a pac-man game who's that I mean it's got feet it's got eyes and so we started thinking about that now the the hand-drawn there that's I believe that's Chris Rhodes writing and that was his first thought about otto having the the eyes and and the feet and and how it would look and it actually looks a lot more similar to what the monsters are but initially that was his thought for the the main hero character for the Otto character so any artists here guys do character design yeah yeah okay here's a workflow for us all right so you would take your character idea you'd sketch it on graph paper like Chris did in the previous slide you'd have to manually encode it into the weird encoding that the graphics roms needed type it in program the ROM burn the ROM stick it into the circuit board and then see how it actually looked on

the screen because we had no control over the screen directly all we have control over is the processor and the screen there's no bitmap in this thing it drives one line at the time and so it's this long process fraught with error takes a while there must be a better way Chris came up with a better way like break anybody played with a lite-brite I mean actual old lite-brite not the new modern ones but the ones with the little pegs light bright so I know Chris use this for some of the character development and so here's how it looks right so you can see on the right there you so you you can't use every hole because it's this weird hexagonal shape so you take every other hole so that you stay on the the Manhattan geometries and what do you do with the holes when you make a hole plug for the mistake with a mistake there how do you fill in the hole like ah I thought of it you take the dark purple

plug and you get the black sharpie and cover it up and you can plug up the light leaking through the hole you don't want so it actually it actually worked pretty well and that's what it looks like so you'd put a sheet of white paper over it like a diffuser and you'd kind of turn off the lights in the room and step back and you could kind of play with it's really cool it's tactile you know you plug in what about this color what about this you know that's what you do today but which one you like better it worked so so anyway so that was that was light bright that was that was kind of a fun thing to to use for character development so we changed the fruits the the pac-man fruit bonuses you know why they're fruit bonuses by the way it's it's it's slot machine bonuses did you ever notice that slot machines there were actually slot machines that were called fruit machines because they gave out fruit gum as a bonus as it as a prize so if you lined

up cherries you got cherry gum that's why they were there and that's why they were picked and the same thing with the the the bell and the key those were typical slot machine bonuses so we wanted everything to be edible number one number two we wanted to avoid any trademark issues so that's why we got rid of the Galaxian character and then we got rid of the stupid great nobody knew they were grapes people said oh that you know that green one there oh that's the grenade no it's it's a bunch of grapes it just looks stupid because it's only 14 pixels on the side so let's get rid of that one right so we did our own and the pretzel the pretzel was sort of an honor of Kevin Curran because he liked salty things and so we put in a pretzel it wasn't very healthy everything else is fruity and healthy and here's the Kevin's pretzel all right so so again back to our intellectual property we're doing all this and we're really getting good at intellectual

property because we're in the middle of our lawsuit now with Atari remember and all the things they're complaining about oh geez won't do that again so we're designing that into this kit change the characters change the name and protect our code and our code overlaid on top of the existing Midway Namco code alright so let's talk about source code for a minute oh by the way source code more show and tell I have the MS pacman source code here in paper and so you can you can come up and look at it later if you want because so what do I have this one isn't marked up at all this is just a you know printout from our our 8-inch floppy them so you can look at that so source code looks like okay here's the fruit driver this code is to make the fruit bunts across the screen and it goes count zero spaces and then goes poof so this is that the code obviously represents the the

comment represents code that is no longer there you don't do that do you leave old comments lying around in your code the horror so but that's that's what that is a lot of what we did ended up being tables tables for code we wrote and tables that use the existing pac-man code for example the maze maze is a big table now we have four mazes so you had to do some code to select which one to use but it's basically a table so let me talk about the patches how do we get our hooks into the existing pac-man code so the hardware allowed us to do these little eight bite patches and the hardware would dynamically look at the address and would say oh you're in one of the eight bite patches and in boom and it would replace dynamically replace the code with our own code generally with something like a jump statement and boom it would jump off into our own address

space where all of our new code would be so you can see here's here's the patches and it tells you where it is and oh the top one is easy it's just an xor instruction we wanted to modify one instruction so that's pretty easy but the second one down there patch four new attract mode so at that location in pacman address space you jump out to some of our code so that's how that's how that worked here's some more patches oh those bottom four those are the really clever ones the patch to make the monsters move randomly randomize the AI there's about there's 40 of those patches forty of the eight bite patches and that was a limitation it was a hardware limitation we could not support an infinite number of patches it's only 40 complicated reasons as to why that was but that limited what we could do there's only so much we could do in the in modifying the game this is from the third from some of the animation code and you can see by Mike's comments there

his his uh definitions that there's two characters one is called Otto and the other is called Anna so I guess miss pac-man his name is Anna who knew so okay let's go back to Atari for a second remember the Atari settlement one of the things in the Atari settlement was we will not market an enhancement kit without the permission of the manufacturer now our tari figures be yeah who's going to give these clowns permission to modify a game nobody's going to do it and we pushed back and we said look we've been working all these months while we've been in court with you guys we have this kit done we want to be able to sell it and okay so that got put into our agreement with Atari so Kevin this is a huge bluff here right nobody knows about our agreement with Atari that's secret all the industry knows is

that Atari dropped their lawsuit so Kevin Kevin you know 21 year old MIT dropout calls Dave Moravsky of Midway president of Midway Midway who has the most popular game in the Western Hemisphere right now pac-man and he is just annoyed as heck because there's all sorts of copyright violations going on people wholesale pirating his game and making copies of it there's people making pac-man t-shirts and pac-man trash cans and all this and he's just in court all the time trying to shut these people down and here's somebody who calls him up first so he's kind of cool and Kevin's kind of goes like this Kevin says hey you may have heard that we trounced and pounded Atari in court and they dropped their lawsuit we're about to do the same thing to you we're about to bring out a kit and we just want if any disagreements you think you may have let's settle them now because we don't

we don't want to have to take you to court too so so good Dave says hey well we wanted to come out and talk to us sure thing so we go out to visit Midway this is the day after we sign the Atari deal they were both in Chicago all right was a really good week for us here and and Dave and though they gave us a tie they're like here guys here have a tie so I still have this just pack my pac-man tie from the from from that first visit and it took a few weeks to negotiate things and finally by the end of October we negotiated an agreement with them that hey we're gonna buy this kit from you and maybe we'll do it as a new game maybe we'll sell it as a kit maybe we'll do it as a new game but Midway is going to market it dude sure okay no problem so remember they don't know about our Atari deal they and they

think and I think in the back of their minds they're thinking hey we can have these kids more stuff for us sorry it's like a one-shot deal you just don't know it yet so so here in one month we've we've struck deals with the top two game manufacturers in the country it's just like dude we're having a good time here it's like looking better and better that dropping out of school was the thing to do so and we're already talking at this point about changing the name to super pac-man because we don't have the trademark issues anymore so we can change it to super pac-man ROM dumps this turns out to be really critical later as my rom dumps that I made October 29th so we can go back and show what what were we able to do right then backups are important if your co-developers backups are important who's hosting your repository mmm do you have access to it okay you never know when you'll need proof of ownership ask me why I know ask me in about five minutes so so here's we had by then we'd

written into a track mode and we didn't know is it going to be crazy Otto is it going to be super pac-man so we had both by then and we had come up with this cool Midway logo because they're giving us money we're going to be nice to them and then Stan calls and I took this phone call this is early November Stan calls up I answer the phone Stan says hey we want to make the female character the main character of the game we're going to call it miss pac-man mi SS miss pac-man it's going to be cool Stan there's all these fourteen-year-old boys in the arcade aren't they gonna be like turned off by that music no no no no it's really cool cuz pac-man is very popular with with girls and women we're like yeah yeah okay sure fine no problem we'll do that so we made the female character what's she gonna look like so let's show some of the character changes so a name changes so so the top line is crazy Auto and you can see Auto actually was fairly complicated because pac-man is just

three characters that to do pac-man and auto there's four going each direction because there's four when he goes left and right and there's four when he goes away and toward you right and then if it's super pac-man well it's just back to pac-man and maybe you rotates and that's about it but the first thing we did when we went to miss pac-man was that next to the bottom on where she's got the red hair and she still has the 3d movement where she turns toward you and she turns away from and when she's turning away from you all you see is the red and it looks kind of like the red monster and and and also fairly quickly this is like all in the span of like a week two weeks fairly quickly someone realized oh my gosh she has a baby we cannot have her be miss pac-man you know out of wedlock video game birth No so Oh pac-woman okay okay it so it almost was packed woman and and and then finally very quickly MS pacman okay miss pac-man

great and the the character ended up the character we know in love at the bottom where she has a bow and she's got a beauty mark and she's got a blinky eye with eyelashes and that's pretty good for 14 by 14 pixels you know the hardware supports 16 by 16 but you have to leave a black row all the way around so that it doesn't collide with the maze so it's 14 by 14 pretty cool in despite what you might read on the internet imagine the internet got something wrong Namco knew about this right from the start Namco knew about this and in fact they were involved with the design of the character and and not to Morrison commented that he did not like the red hair and so that was one of the reasons why we got rid of the character with the red hair and ended up with the character with the bow so Namco would absolutely knew about this kit right from the start and we ended up with Miss pac-man the

way she is now okay this is the the hardware design they're sick tnk rom pac-man code and then we have 10k on our on our little ox board and an interesting encryption quote encryption with the bit Swizzle so you cannot just copy take the ROM off of the miss pac-man aux board and learn how to do it learn anything from the code and the anti copying hardware remember our original goal was not the copy the original code at this point it doesn't matter and really it's more interesting because it makes it difficult to copy the game and it kept the pirates away MS pacman was not cloned was not pirated for about six months which allowed Midway to really ramp up the production and which was which was pretty awesome so thanks to that was that was my my my code the in anti copying hardware and if you look at your miss pac-man aux kit

what's the part number on there CG that's our CG prefix again so a little bit of general computer there and that's what it looks like inside it's like so on the left of that that's all pac-man it's just a generic pac-man board and then the aux board plugs in and changes it and we got a patent on our anti copying so that was kind of cool so and again it wasn't pirated for six months so basically what it does is it watches for an access that would never happen during normal game operation and if it sees that it says ah you're one of those evil pirates that's trying to dump the code from this game and I'm going to hose you over and it changes the encryption algorithm dynamically hidden messages in the game there's the damn coaster egg you know about this this is in pac-man but you can actually get to it in miss pac-man as well we didn't know about it and so we didn't take it out it's there miss pac-man in the character ROM you see the gen comp there

in the middle on the left that was from our logo from our original attract mode and it's still in there so in every miss pac-man produced there it is and but then way buried in the code is this little message general computer corporation hello Nakamura at the very end of it so we put that in there why would you do this well because it's interesting to prove an infringement with someone else's code you can go and find this ask me how I know bugs a couple of bugs there was a parking bug there was a place you could hide in the first maze that and the monsters wouldn't get to you so we had to fix that the very last thing we found because we did not have a cocktail table was it didn't work correctly would in cocktail mode and so we had to fix that the collision bug where you can go through the monster we knew about that and left it alone and then the last one players always ask me this because they're all about playing to the end of

the game and that level 255 bug you know about this right you get to level 255 and it goes crazy did you know about that you should have fixed it listen if you get to that bug how long have you been playing the game five hours that's the bug is that you've been playing a game for five hours okay I want you dropping another quarter in there after three minutes so I was like if we had found that we would have just laughed and said yeah hey we don't care right we would have made the game harder so you'd never get there so what we would have done so final code release in late January 1982 and goes into production well also January 1982 this is how we used to get news high-resolution full-color solar powered portable news delivery system random access delivered to your desktop weekly this is actually an amazing article about the state of the game industry in 1982 it's it's phenomenal and so my car which gets this

game gets this magazine and he comes into our new development space there in Cambridge and in the upper right there you can this is the opening spread for the article in the upper right you can see a Missile Command game he's like guys is this super missile attack can you tell and we're looking at it we're like no can't quite tell the colors aren't changed and maybe it's super missile attack maybe you can't tell and then we look at the lower right go oh my god it's crazy auto you know pac-man scuttles about the maze no it's crazy Otto okay do the math here there's a hundred and ten thousand pac-man cabinets in the US three of them have been modified for crazy Otto and are out on test and the photographer picked one to take the picture of so for thirty years this has been the mythical pac-man with legs um oh my god what is it what it well it was crazy otto was our game out on tests and who knew so again you know more press more press is good press so so so that's that that's

kind of fun who did the development for crazy otto and miss pac-man there's the the seven of us who did it what the general computer go on to do later we did a food fight in quantum for Atari calling up games we also did a coin up game nightmare that was never produced we did junior pac-man coin up game for Midway then also for Atari we did a phenomenal amount of home titles for Atari over those few years 1982 through 1984 we also did the Atari 7800 Pro System their next generation game unit we did the entire thing we did the custom graphics processor we did 14 cartridges for launch we did very novel and Crypt you want a good ports motor post-mortem talk this one this would be a cool talk alright and so that was a pro system oh we didn't design the plastic content block box that came from

Atari but everything else we did here's general computer in 1984 at the height sort of the height of our game game design and but 1984 was notable for the video game crash Atari got sold to Jack Tramel and everything went away and what are we going to do now well luckily GCC lived on as GCC technologies and since we were good at hacking things we hacked the Macintosh which had just been introduced in February and we did the first hard disk internal hard disk for the Apple Macintosh which Steve Jobs had been assured by his engineers was impossible to do so we were pretty thrilled about that and went on to do more Mac peripherals laser printers company called video Guide which did an early set-top box so on we went and XGC Sears went on to do great things in industry so it was quite

the quite the breeding ground for tech tech founders and tech managers but 20 years later what happens 20 years later Kevin's taking a drive and he's on the Mass Pike and he stops at a rest stop and he sees this game 20th anniversary miss pac-man introduced in 2001 by Namco and then they did a 25th anniversary later on and Kevin's first thought of course is where's my royalty check so let's review shall we so we had a number of contracts and lawsuits we actually had to sue Midway at one point and trounced them like we promised we would so so Kevin is like hey look October of 83 we actually had a contract with Namco at this point miss pac-man is done right it is done 1983 no more coin op no more trash cans no more nothing and so we

signed a yeah yeah if we ever make any more we'll tell you this much dude you're making them again so it took a while to negotiate and we eventually went into demand for arbitration I mean they like they didn't know they didn't know we a contract it was 20 years later all those people are long gone from Namco we had to fax him the contract see all right so let's talk about language the language in your contract the language matters okay let me tell you why it matters what's different about these two machines you notice we get paid for one and not for the other here's a hint the one on the left has a coin slot so we get paid for those because the contract says coin operate a game and the arbitrator said coin operated game means coin operated game we're like no no no no that's back that's what we called these big arcade things back then we just generically

refer to them as that he's like coin-operated means coin-operated like okay all right so we we don't get me wrong it's actually coin-operated here's another phrase this is very wordy the highlights come from the arbitrator this is where we won big in our language we get paid for electronic distribution this is Kevin Kern wrote this electronic distribution of the game if it's in any other way transmitted to any other receiving device like say cell phone or your xbox right and so nobody had thought about cell phones back then but this was read very expansively by the arbitrator and so we got it and we had to reverse engineer to show usage of our code and our hello Nakamura message was found so that was one way we showed usage of our code and here's the six of

us after our arbitration successfully was found mostly in our favor six of us who worked on it we're still getting royalties no mostly they kind of dropped off in the last last year or so so you know buy more for your phone and thank you I've got to thank the pac-man people you at a Nissan who I've never met and would love to because if they had not made pac-man we would never have been able to make miss pac-man and my final comment is you know this is called a post-mortem but post mortem means somebody died and I don't see that maybe it's a post partum you know miss pac-man miss pac-man lives on thank you thank you very much we have a few minutes for questions thank you any questions anybody jumping up yes yes can you say something very

briefly about how the AI for the for the ghosts work just sort of the general rules about how the very simple process or pilots them around I will attempt to because mostly we didn't change it right we didn't need to understand how it worked we just needed to understand how to modify it a little bit and but basically there's the the monsters are in one of several modes they're either in their scatter mode of going to a corner of the maze or they're chasing the pac-man or they're running away from it that's basically I think there's a fourth mode that no one knows about much but but but that's it and it's how do they stay in those modes partly it's time how long have you been in on a particular maze and then it switches into attack mode and that changes as the mazes move on so it's somewhat

table-driven that's why later in the in later racks you you never get any time where you're not being attacked and not being chased so oh one more thing by that but please be sure and fill out your evaluation forms that you'll get by email so do that yes and you asked a great question so come up here we have a gift for you you see my son Jacob Jacob here who by the way was the world champion at crazy Auto for many years because he's the only person who got to play it because it was in my basement so we took it to California extreme one year and people got to play and they beat your score so anyway any other questions well yes it what are your thoughts about modifying existing games today there's a lot of companies that don't take kindly to their games being modified and there's some companies that will release games with you know full level editors especially on back in the 90s that was a big thing but do you do

like the way you know the the legal precedents are going or do you think maybe it could be a little more liberal that's a great question to you get it you get a gift come up and see Jacob so so it depends on how I'm making my money okay if I'm selling new games well I want and I want my new games and you'd better not modify it if I'm making money doing modifications then I would change it differently let me answer your question another way I think the law has been more settled now and I could reel off all the the cases that have happened in the past 30 years to give the original designer of the game much more legal standing and control over their game and so I think it makes it much more difficult as a to legally modify it if the original

developer does not want you to okay now let me put my opinion hat on I think that that can be a great thing to make your game more popular if you allow it to be modified so I think it's really cool for people to say hey here's a level editor go at it and and have some fun at it but intellectual property is important this is how you make your money and so it deserves to be protected so just imagine you might be that other guy like we get soon as we got hired by Atari we're like oh that was evil you know enhance but Kidd people are going to stop that because that's how we're we're making our money all of a sudden so thank you yeah come see Jacob I'm seeing anybody else one more question maybe yes yes oh we got a queer to stop we got to stop I will be at this wrap-up room which we have to go all the way into the West hall room 2022 and I'll have all my good goodie things to show and so so feel free to feel free to follow follow me

over there thank you very much [Applause]