“I’m Steve Golson, and you’re all here to hear about Ms. Pac-Man,” he said, by way of opening a postmortem of his work on the arcade classic at GDC. Here are some choice highlights of the crazy tale.
At GDC in San Francisco today one man took the stage to talk about a little game he made, back in the ‘80s.
“I’m Steve Golson, and you’re all here to hear about Ms. Pac-Man,” he said, by way of opening a postmortem of his work on the arcade classic. It was an in-depth look at how the game grew out of a Pac-Man upgrade kit tentatively titled "Crazy Otto," and what follows are some notable highlights.
Golson started his story with the General Computer Corporation, which did “a tremendous amount of game design work in the early ‘80s.” But before that he talked about how MIT students (and eventual GCC cofounderes) Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran started a partnership at the university in 1978 to get pinball machines into the dorms at MIT.
“So they came up to speed on how you maintain these games, how you keep them operating, and how you make money at it,” remembers Golson. They also got acquainted with what were called “speed-up kits,” sold by third-party firms to arcade operators.
“You’d get great revenues for a while, and then revenues would drop off,” said Golson. “What’s wrong? Players would get really good at the game, and play for longer and longer.”
“Speed-up kits” offered an answer: they could change up a machine, make things faster or more complex. The name was coined for an aftermarket upgrade for the Asteroids machine which implemented a hardware modification to make the game run faster.
After Asteroids mods came “Super Galaxian” kits, said Golson, which mucked around with Galaxian’s data tables (stored in read-only memory). However, ROM-based “speed-up kits” were problematic, in the veteran engineer’s estimation.
“Anybody who knows how to copy a ROM can now copy your kit,” said Golson. “That’s the worst problem of all.”
Eventually, Golson remembers he and his fellow MIT students got Missile Command machines in, and after the machines’ earnings started to drop off (as players started to master the game) they started looking for upgrade kits. But they couldn’t find any, so they decided to try and do it themselves.
"Hey, we go to MIT...I bet we could make a kit!"
“Hey, we go to MIT,” said Golson, recounting conversations between Macrae, Curran, other students and (presumably). “I bet we could make a kit!”
Thus, General Computer Corporation was born. They had a microprocessor emulator that coud reverse-engineer code running on the GenRad 6502 running Missile Command, and so that’s exactly what they did -- by hand.
To avoid trademark infringement General Computer called the mod “Super Missile Attack” and built it with some proprietary hardware so it couldn’t be ripped off by competing kit makers.
So they advertised the mod for sale in major arcade magazines and waited for the money to roll in.
“We got calls from arcade operators saying ‘players are coming in and saying “Do you have Super Missile Attack?” And when they hear we don’t, they’re leaving,’” recounted Golson. “It was awesome, we got a lot of word-of-mouth.”
As word spread, more and more people got worked up about the Missile Command mod kit -- including Missile Command maker Atari, who took General Computer to court in a $10 million infringement lawsuit.
“This went on….we’re not backing down….and after a while Atari got annoyed,” said Golson. “So they hired us.”
Or rather, GCC convinced Atari to settle, drop its lawsuit with prejudice, and instead offer the small company a two-year, $50k/month deal to make games for Atari -- though it sounds like there were no real expectations they'd actually make anything.
"We found out, years later, that they thought we were just going to take the money and run, just go sit on a beach," said Golson.
Further, General Computer agreed to not sell any more Super Missile Command kits -- or any kits, for that matter, without the game manufacturers’ consent (that becomes very important later.)
Golson was quick to point out that Atari likely settled to avoid the chance (however small) that GCC might win and set a new legal precedent for game modding.
“This was the key thing 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,” said Golson. “The legal protection for games, at this time, was very unsettled.”
After that GCC had a contract to make games for Atari. But here's the thing -- after wrapping up work on Super Missile Command, GCC had started working on a kit for another popular game: Pac-Man.
This Pac-Man upgrade kit, eventually called “Crazy Otto,” was already in the works during the Atari lawsuit, as GCC had started working on it in June of '81.
But first, they had to buy some new hardware and actually reverse-engineer the Pac-Man code, since Atari wouldn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) provide it to them. Golson actually still has a giant binder of of the Pac-Man source, printed out, and held it up today at GDC (he seemed particularly proud of the pizza stains soaked into some of the old pages.)
Reverse-engineering Pac-Man
As part of that reverse-engineering process the General Computer team played around with emulating Pac-Man, running it backwards and forwards at variable speeds -- in the process gleaning insights into the game’s design.