This is Genius! Atari x PAC-MAN Deep Dive

Atari Bandai Namco History

So a brand new collaboration has been announced this week between Atari and the Japanese gaming juggernaut known as Bandai Namco, the company that brought us games like Dig Dug, Galaga, Xevious, and a little game that you may have heard of called Pac-Man among many, many others over the years. Of course, now this isn’t the first time that the two companies have worked together.

Nope! Atari actually had the distribution rights for Namco’s games outside of Japan in the early 1980s, and that’s what led to the creation of this, the Atari 2600 Port of Pac-Man - and this game actually holds the prestigious title of being the best selling console game of all time for the first few years of its existence.

Atari actually sold over 8 million copies of this over the years, believe it or not. Which is all the more surprising considering the fact that it hasn’t really been fondly remembered by history as a very good port. Of course, they had to work within the confines of the Atari 2600’s very limited hardware - and yeah, the graphics and the sound, I will say, do leave quite a bit to be desired.

So I thought that I would share my thoughts and impressions on this latest collaboration from the point of view of a lifelong Atari fan and collector, and indeed also a big fan of the Bandai Namco brand as well. Now, bear in mind, it has been a couple of days since this was announced, so I have spent some time digging into the backstory behind all of this, digging up some more information and in particular monitoring a thread over on the AtariAge forums where Ben from Plaion, who is the guy responsible for all of the recent Atari+ platform stuff, including the hardware that’s coming out as part of this collaboration is actually answering people’s questions and clarifying on some of the finer points of the hardware that’s being released here as well.

So I thought that was very interesting - and I thought that it was worth sharing here, so I’m very excited about this, if you can’t tell. There is a new console - this is the Pac-Man branded version of the Atari 2600+, which if you know me, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of. Anyway. There are five new joysticks as well, and these have some really cool little hidden Easter eggs and stuff that I haven’t really seen covered anywhere else, so we’ll talk about those.

There is a new collection of physical cartridge releases of those Bandai Namco games, this is for the Atari 7800 - so it will run on original 7800 hardware. But more importantly, perhaps from Atari’s point of view on their plus platform, so the 2600+ and 7800+ consoles, and there is a new tweaked, improved port of Pac-Man for the 7800, which has, as far as I know, not been released in this form previously - so we’ll have a look at the story behind that as well - and finally, all of those games are available for the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection from Digital Eclipse, and they are coming as a DLC pack for that, so we’re going to take a look at that as well.

New Console

So this is the Atari 2600+ Pac-Man edition console and joystick bundle as listed over on atari.com for $169.99. Now, I will say, as an Atari fan here in the UK, of course Amazon is the official distributor for all of their new stuff - all of their plus platform consoles like the 2600+, the 7800+, all of their new controllers, the new boxed cartridge releases.

I did go and check over on Amazon as at the time of recording, and none of this new Pac-Man collab stuff was actually listed - so hopefully it will be available here in the UK through official channels at some point in the future. If there is an update regarding that, of course I will pin a comment down below or I may even release an update video on that if there’s quite a bit more information.

But, of course there’s plenty to get stuck into at the moment looking at the hardware and stuff - so that’s what we’ll focus on in this video - and speaking of the hardware, not only do we have some quite nice external improvements, we also have an internal upgrade, which I haven’t really seen widely reported and I think it’s very important, so we’ll talk about that in a second.

But first impressions of the actual console itself: of course, it’s bright yellow, it’s very in your face. It’s got this awesome light up display on the front with Pac-Man and the ghosts. I must admit, when I first saw this, I thought this was going to be some kind of animated OLED thing or something like that, and they’d kind of scroll across the front - no doubt somebody will mod one of these at some point in the future to add something like that because I do think it would be a very cool little mod. But, yeah, to be honest, with this being the way that it is, it’s probably enough of a distraction anyway without stuff moving around on the front of it as well!

And it does look very cool as is - so that’s the console. Now, just to take a very quick diversion - when I first saw this pop up it actually reminded me of a Kee Games prototype that Atari designed way back in the early 1980s - so Kee Games was actually a sister company of Atari primarily on the arcade side of things, and in fact, it says here over on Atari Museum that one of Atari’s early arcade games, that Tank was actually released under the Kee Games brand - so, although it’s known as an Atari game, if you look on the cabinet itself, it doesn’t mention Atari at all - it was actually branded as a Kee Games product, but it was a sister company of Atari. It was owned by the same people and it was basically just all a big ruse to try and pump up their sales figures and stuff at the time, or at least that’s kind of the basic understanding. But yeah, they were going to release a bright red version of the 2600.

So anyone saying that, Hey, you know, old school Atari never would’ve done something like this. Well, there is, there is precedent there.

Now, perhaps more importantly, of course, I mentioned this internal tweak that had been made, and this has been discussed over on AtariAge.com on the forums, and indeed mentioned by Ben from Plaion who developed this hardware. Now I wasn’t aware of this - I thought that the 2600+ and the 7800+ were actually identical internally. But it turns out that there has actually been a very minor change to the hardware that added support for keypads and driving controllers, which apparently aren’t supported by the original 2600+ and there’s been talk of some kind of add-on or internal upgrade that can be added to the 2600+ to to add this functionality.

That has been referred to as the “parity board” because it’s of course creating parity between the two different models - and Ben has discussed this in some detail as - alongside some kind of third party people - he has mentioned that this won’t be, or it’s unlikely to be added to the original 2600+ as a firmware update - so it seems that you do actually need the hardware to be able to support this. But he has confirmed that this upgraded board is part of the new machine, the new collab that we’re talking about in this video.

So that is good - and yeah, perhaps something to bear in mind if you’re trying to decide between this and the original 2600+ - and if you prefer the look of this or the original 2600+. This does have the upgraded hardware internally, which the original doesn’t, so I thought that was quite interesting to see.

And just to round out the rest of this bundle we have the improved CX40+ wireless joystick - so I did a teardown of these, or at least the original wired version of this CX40+ a couple of years ago when it was first released and I was really impressed with the hardware inside this. This was also designed by Plaion.

They changed the original kind of spring leaf switch things for tact switches, and I thought that was quite a nice improvement. It does feel really nice to use and more importantly a lot less painful to use for extended play sessions compared to the original Atari CX40 joysticks.

Finally, of course, we get the re-released version of Pac-Man. This includes a new and improved, slightly tweaked version of a Pac-Man port for the Atari 7800 which came out back in 2006 - and so we’ll take a look at that when we have a look at this new game pack. But yeah, that’s the 2600+ console itself, and not only is this bundle available, I will also point out that over on atari.com there is the Pac-Man Edition and Game Bundle which is $274.96 and that includes the four new games - so we’ve got the re-releases of Dig Dug, Xevious, Galaga, and that new and improved version of Pac-Man that I mentioned - and that also includes the 2600 version, I will say, and we’ve got the Mega Collector Bundle as well, which is $434.92 and as well as the console and those four games, also includes the five different color coded CX40 joysticks that we’re going to take a look at in a second - so yeah, in the colors of all of the ghosts from the original game.

New Joysticks

So yeah, on that note, I think it’s time we had a closer look at those right now - so this is the Joystick Bundle Ghost Edition Plus Pac-Man Edition Wireless Joysticks as listed over on atari.com for $199.95 - and again, this is a pre-order and again, unfortunately no information on UK availability or pricing for these as at the time of recording.

Now, as we can see, this is a pack of five, the five new colorways for the new and improved wireless version of the CX40+ joystick. We have the yellow Pac-Man version that we just saw bundled with that console - and we have four new colors which correspond to the the four ghosts from Pac-Man: of course, Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde.

Don’t ask me what the names were originally in Japanese, ‘cause I can never remember, but as we can see, we have red, orange, pink and blue - and the good news here, if you don’t have four friends to play with, or, perhaps you just don’t want to spend $200 on five joysticks, the good news is that you can actually order these individually as well, so these are $39.99 and they have some quite interesting tricks up their sleeves as well - some interesting Easter eggs and features - and also they’re wireless as mentioned, so let’s talk about that now.

These do come with wireless dongles - so they’re not Bluetooth, they are their own kind of proprietary wireless technology, and this is a technology that was introduced with the 7800+ console - so those CX78+ control pads that were released with that console were wireless, and the way they actually did it, I think was really clever because they came with two separate dongles - so we have a DE-9 dongle and a USB dongle.

So first up, the DE-9 dongle, of course that means that for a start, these plus consoles have the original DE-9 controller connectors on them, so you can use all of your original controllers with these new consoles, and that’s how they’ve chosen to connect the new joysticks to them as well for authenticity, which I think is really cool, is a really nice feature from day one - and of course it means that these new joysticks also work with all of your old hardware - so if you have an Atari 2600 or a 7800 or indeed an ST or hey, anything else that supports the Atari joystick standards, so MSX or even an Amiga that you want to plug one of these joysticks into, you can do that using this dongle.

I have tested that and it works great - so yeah, hats off to Atari and to Plaion for thinking of that particular feature because I think it’s a really nice touch. But also you get the USB dongle - so if you want to use this joystick with you know, your modern day PC or Mac or whatever, or perhaps more importantly you have an emulation setup running on a Raspberry Pi or even a MiSTer, you can plug this into that and you can have a, a pretty damn authentic experience with an original Atari joystick for playing all of those thousands and thousands of classic Atari games - and again, as I mentioned kind of earlier on in this video, I’m a big fan of Atari’s new branding with all of this stuff.

I’m loving what they’re doing with their new packaging, and these joysticks are no exception. We’ve got these very cute looking stylized versions of Pac-Man and the four ghosts on the side of the boxes here - and, you know, it’s just quite a classy looking very professional kind of retail package - so again you know, hats off to Atari for that.

Now as far as the joysticks themselves are concerned, actually we’ll have a look at the individual product page because it shows it in a bit more detail.

We have a couple of interesting little features here, a couple of interesting little Easter eggs that have been pointed out - so on top of the sticks, we have the individual characters - and this actually reminded me again, of something that Atari have previously done in the past, specifically with the original version of these joysticks.

So, way back in 1977, when Atari released the VCS or the Video Computer System, before it was even known as the 2600, they had an original version of these joysticks called the CX10, which looked like this, and these actually had these little discs that kind of slotted into the top of the stick with the Atari logo on.

There were some other differences as well - the internals were completely different and they ended up being redesigned. These were only available for about a year when the console first launched, so these are very, very rare and they are even rarer to find with the discs in the top of the stick because they all tended to fall out over the years, as you might expect.

But yeah, I thought this was quite a nice little homage to that. Now, one thing that this product page doesn’t really show - that it doesn’t really do justice to - is just how cool these look in real life. So thankfully Ben has posted a picture of this over on AtariAge and also pointed out a bit of an Easter egg as well.

So. These are the joysticks and he’s pointed out that the lines around the joystick ring are now Pac-Man dots and power pellets. Obviously they were just kind of little markers before as per the original joysticks - so that’s a nice little touch for the Pac-Man edition. But also, as you can see these discs in the top of the sticks are actually kind of raised inserts as per those original CX10 joysticks, so they’re not just printed on.

I do think the renders on the website do kind of give that impression, which is a bit unfortunate. But no, they are actually kind of proper tactile things, kind of molded into the top of the stick itself - so I also thought that that was a rather nice little touch.

But of course, you’re going to need some games to play on this thing - so I think next up, let’s take a look at these new re-released Bandai Namco cartridges.

New Namco Games

Right, it’s time to talk games! Finally, and of course, specifically the High Score Collection 7800 as listed over on atari.com for $169.99 - usual caveats apply about this being a pre-order and also about me not having any information about UK pricing or availability.

Now, as you might expect, these are re-release of classic Namco games: so we have Galaga, Xevious, Pac-Man, and Dig Dug - and in the case of three of these games, they are actually just straight reissues of the original versions of these - so the Atari 7800 console was actually developed by an outside company called GCC or General Computer Corporation.

I did talk about this in a video on my channel if you’re interested in the story because it is quite an interesting story - and as part of that deal, they also worked on some arcade ports for Atari for that console - specifically Galaga, Xevious, and Dig Dug - and yeah, those ports are actually quite highly regarded, they are quite high quality arcade ports and they were very well received at the time. Although, to be fair, by the time the 7800 was released, people had kind of started to move on from arcade ports at home. They wanted slightly more interesting experiences like your Marios and stuff like that.

So they were never big sellers and unfortunately that means that those games are actually quite rare and quite expensive to collect for that system. You can see I do have Galaga here, but I don’t actually have Xevious or Dig Dug for the 7800 in my collection because they are quite pricey.

So quite nice to see official re-release of those. Of course, there’s no substitute for the original releases when you’re a collector. Nice to have a physical option available - and of course, they do work on the original 7800 console as well, and of course the new Atari+ consoles as you might expect.

Now, just before we go into the details of the specific games, I will also say that these are also, as you might imagine, available separately - so for $34.99 we’ve got nice boxed copies of these games and I did actually get a couple of these with the 7800 press pack that I received a while back so if you want to see the review of that and my impressions of those, you can check out that video. But I’m not just here to shout out my own videos, I promise! What’s really interesting here is Pac-Man specifically because there wasn’t an official port of Pac-Man on the 7800 back in the day - if we check the list of releases over on Wikipedia, Pac-Man is actually listed under this section here, which is Unlicensed Games, and the release date is listed as 2005.

The author being Robert DeCrescenzo and Robert as it happens, is actually quite active over on the AtariAge forums as well, and has actually given some background information on this, which we’ll talk about in a second. But first what I will say is I just wanted to give a bit of a shout out to this video over on Retro Bliss Gaming, which is a smaller channel, but it’s actually an interview with him about all of the games that he’s developed. He’s done a load of ports and homebrew stuff for the 7800 over the years, and a really fascinating guy - so I will link to this down below if you want to go and check out this interview and learn a bit more about the guy behind the port itself.

I will say, just as an aside. But yeah, he did release this version of Pac-Man for the 7800 back in 2005, or it says 2006 here on AtariAge. But this was a collection which included a few different ports and a few different versions of Pac-Man, and it was released as a kind of a homebrew unofficial release.

Very, very highly regarded, as we can see from the reviews here, basically a hundred percent all round, 75% from some grumpy people over in Germany apparently. It even includes some weird versions of of Pac-Man that I hadn’t heard of, like Hangly Man and Ultra Pac-Man - so if you can track down that version it’s probably worth checking out.

But yeah, Ben from Plaion has confirmed over on the AtariAge forums that Bob was involved with this porting effort - and Bob also chipped in himself and said that it’s the 40th anniversary version that he did, but the entire maze is on the screen. It’s only Pac-Man, so it doesn’t include the other games that were part of that that 40th anniversary collection back in 2006.

So yeah, it doesn’t include Hangly Man and ultra Pac-Man, unfortunately. Just another thing that I should point out actually, because this didn’t really fit anywhere else, but I, saw this pop up and thought it was quite cool - someone also pointed out that the labels on the games were actually quite reminiscent of Hiro Kimura’s work on some of the original Pac-Man marketing - and Ben did point out that Hiro Kimura did actually do the artwork for these re-releases as well - so that’s really cool. That’s a really cool connection to the original releases of these games - and of course, the original kind of Atari and Namco artwork that was commissioned for those way back in the day.

But anyway, getting back onto Pac-Man itself. This is actually being marketed as-

I’ve lost my page now… There it is-

This is being marketed as the Pac-Man Double Feature - so the interesting thing about this release is that it includes not only that new and improved Atari 7800 version by by Bob himself which is you know, has been tweaked to make it more authentic to the arcade release.

It also includes the ill-fated Atari 2600 version - the much-maligned and slated online Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. I will say I actually don’t hate this game. You know, I think they did a great job considering the limitations of the hardware at the time. But yeah, in the name of preservation, they have actually included that version on the cartridge as well so if you want to experience the original Atari 2600 experience from 1982, you can do that - and then if you want to go and check out a more arcade-authentic experience on the same cartridge as based on the 7800 hardware you can play that version as well - and colored cartridges as well, not just your plain black, so that’s also nice to see.

But hey, if you don’t have the physical hardware, but you want to play these old games anyway, there is another option available to you, which has also been a announced this week - so let’s take a look at that now.

New Atari 50th Collection DLC

[We had Atari Japan that we ended up selling to Namco - Atari Japan Actually put Namco in the video games business.]

[Ready sir? Peeling off. Cover me!]

[You’re watching television - somebody’s playing a video game. They have an Xbox controller. It doesn’t matter what they have. What do you hear when you’re watching it? You hear Pac-Man, you hear this Pac-Man.]

[Galaxian, the arcade hit now for the Atari 2600 system.]

[I mean, this is really the breakthrough video game that went from games selling 100,000 to - it sold 10 million.]

…and that was the trailer for the Namco Legendary Pack, DLC for the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection, of course, released a few years back by Digital Eclipse - and just before we have a look at those games, I must admit this really made me chuckle at the beginning of this trailer - so we have a “Teen” rating here for these various reasons that we can see listed on screen, and I must admit, when this trailer first popped up and I watched it, I was thinking:

“Where in Dig Dug are there drug references and sexual themes and- you know what I mean!?”

“Were there some cutscenes in Pac-Man that I missed out on that I wasn’t aware of!?”

But of course this is part of the Atari 50 Collection, and if you are familiar with that collection - I’m a huge fan of this, I actually bought this on day one and have thoroughly enjoyed every single aspect of it. Of course it’s this interactive documentary kind of museum experience. They’ve got interviews with all the original developers, all the various different versions of the games, different ports of the various games, unseen development documentation and prototypes and stuff like that.

It really is a really kind of comprehensive look into Atari history - and of course the kind of stuff that was going on at Atari at the time is discussed quite openly in some of those interviews - so yeah, there is actually that kind of content included as part of this pack. Yeah, not an angle that I considered, but yeah. Like I mentioned I’m a big fan of the Atari 50th Anniversary Celebration. You can go pick that up on Steam. It’s available on the consoles and stuff as well - and there have been a couple of DLC packs for this already - so listed over here for £6.69 each at the moment on Steam.

There’s “The Wider World of Atari”, which added a load of Atari games that weren’t covered in the original release - some playable games and also some new documentary footage and stuff - and there was also “The First Console War” pack as well, which is like all of the Intellivision stuff. Of course, modern Day Atari recently acquired the rights to all of the historical Intellivision games and things, and they actually added that to the Atari 50 Collection as kind of a, you know, kind of a, how it related to Atari at the time as their kind of big competitor, which was really interesting to see.

So this is the third DLC pack for Atari 50, and it’s called “The Namco Legendary Pack” - so if we click through to this, no release date listed on the Steam page, unfortunately, so it is available to wishlist at the moment. It says here that it features three Pac-Man games - so we’ve got Pac-Man 2600, the good old version here, the 5200 and the Atari 8-bit versions, which I thought was quite interesting because as far as I was concerned, I thought that the 5200 and 8-bit versions were pretty much identical because they are essentially the same machine internally with a few very, very kind of minor technical differences, so it’ll be interesting to see what the actual differences are between those two versions.

It doesn’t mention the the new 7800 version, which I think is quite odd - just that original 2600 release. But hey it also mentions that this marks the first ever re-release of these games for consoles.

There’s the interactive timeline, as you might expect from Atari 50 - so we’ve got the history of Namco titles on Atari consoles. Featuring video interviews with the developers archival materials and documents, photos from the era and more - and we have the arcade versions of Dig Dug and Xevious developed by Namco in Japan and originally released by Atari Rereleased in this form for the first time ever.

Of course, Atari had the distribution rights for those arcade games as well outside of Japan. We have the home console versions of Galaga, Xevious, Galaxian, and Dig Dug, and there are indeed some excellent ports of those games on particularly the Atari 8-bit I will say - so it’d be really cool to check those out as well.

So, yeah. You know, it’s £6.69. I’m not quite sure what the pricing is in the US of course, it will be similar, about $10 ish, I guess. You get all that historical documentary footage, all of those interviews with the original developers, and of course the playable versions of the games as well - so if you have the Atari 50 Collection on one of the consoles, or indeed on the PC, and you want to check out these Namco games you will very shortly be able to do that, and there’s no need to pick up the new 2600+ or indeed any of these physical cartridges if that is not your particular bag.

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