THE SECRET ORIGIN OF PAC-MAN WORLD:
"After most of team had been fired from Pac-Man Ghost Zone, we started staffing the studio back up to create Pac-Man World. Our new Studio director wanted the game to be set in the world of Pac-Man, much like the arcade game Pac-Land. At that point, the Ghost Lord was about the only thing we retained from the original idea, so we came up with the story that he was sending his ghosts out to capture pac-dots ala Mezmeron in the cartoon. All of the game levels answered the question "where do pac-dots come from?" The player started in the pac-dot forest, travelled down a river to a pac-dot mill, rode a train loaded with pac-dots to town where they would be processed in a factory (some of them were irradiated into power-pellets) and then a showdown at the Ghost Lord's haunted headquarters. However, our studio director said "I have never seen trees look good in a game. Get rid of the forest." So, we threw out the whole pac-dot story idea and started over. The poor Ghost Lord didn't survive this transition and was replaced by his arch-enemy Toc-Man (which is Namcot - the original name of Namco - spelled backwards)
Toc-man had a very bizarre but funny origin. In reality, he was a little ghost named Orson who was a childhood friend of Pac-Man. Orson always failed where Pac-Man succeeded. The failure drove Orson insane and he decided that if everyone loved Pac-Man he would become Pac-Man and take his place. He wore a mechanical Pac-Man suit and had an inflatable Ms. Pac-Man for a wife (I'm not surprised that she never ended up in the game). Orson then kidnapped all of Pac-Man's friends to be present at a 20th anniversary party in his (Toc-Man's) honor. Did I mention that Pac-Man's friends were all characters from Namco's history? Mappy, Valkyrie, Dig Dug and others were supposed to be in the game, but they were dropped at the last minute in favor of Pac-man's family instead. It's why Pooka is still in the game - Pac-Man didn't have a big enough family for all of the levels!
Speaking of the levels, we took inspiration from games like Crash Bandicoot and places like Disneyland. Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, Tomorrowland. There's homages to them all over that game. At this point we were more focused on making exciting themed levels - it didn't matter if they made much sense in context of the storyline. But there was one thing I never liked in the game - the shooting. It just didn't feel right for Pac-Man to shoot a projectile. We argued that Pac-Man was never aggressive - he would only fight back after he had eaten a power-pellet. We had many heated discussions but in the end, the management wanted it in, so in it stayed. Overall, I'm proud of my involvement in Pac-Man World, that the team was able to re-energize such an iconic character and help continue his gaming legacy."
WRITTEN BY SCOTT ROGERS.
After deciding that game designers have more fun, Scott Rogers embarked on a 16 year career creating exciting game designs for a number of titles including Sony's GOD OF WAR, Capcom's MAXIMO: GHOSTS TO GLORY and its sequel MAXIMO VS. ARMY OF ZIN and Namco's PAC-MAN WORLD. He is currently a Creative Manager at THQ on many titles including DRAWN TO LIFE and DARKSIDERS.
POST MORTEM:
Blinky, Pinky, Inky, Clyde, and Weezie. Wait a second, who the heck is Weezie? I'm Weezie, Jason Weesner, the fifth ghost in Pac-Man World 20th Anniversary who doesn't appear in the credits, but who's work still remains in the first two worlds (the Pirate and Ruins levels) and a lot of the game mechanics (the Namco character cameos, slot machine, and the King Galaxian to name a few). When I started at Namco on what was originally known as Pac-Man Ghost Zone, I was excited not only to work for one of my favorite Japanese publishers, but also to work on bringing a classic arcade superstar to the home consoles in a character-based game.
Great videogame characters strike a careful balance between playability (controls, responsiveness, player mechanics, etc.) and presentation (appearance, back story, emotions, etc.). It's far too easy for a rift to occur between the two aspects which can create an unplayable and / or unlikable character. Coming onto the Pac-Man Ghost Zone team, I knew a few things about Pac-Man that I found endearing and compelling: Pac-Man likes to eat, he's mostly afraid of ghosts, he's got a hot wife, and he lives in a maze. Additionally, he's as well-known as Mickey Mouse or Mario! Even to this day, I'd never started a project with such a strong foundation to build great gameplay and expectations on top of! These were the qualities I established as my pillars for designing the game.
Even though the original Pac-Man is an elegantly simple game, just about everybody at Namco Hometek had a different idea of what Pac-Man would be like as a platformer character. There were a few good decisions made towards the start of the project to help solve this. New abilities that complimented both his appearance and basic gameplay mechanics were added. These additions felt natural to the character and worked especially well in concert with some of the level layouts and other mechanics:
• The Dot Suck: Scott Rogers was one of the other designers on the project who survived from the original Ghost Zone team. He listened to his music too loud, had an obsessive love of Disneyland, and came up with some of our best game mechanics. One of these was the Dot Suck which enabled Pac-Man to greedily eat chains of pellets and pull off cool acrobatics in the process.
• The Rev-Roll: one of the cool things about a 3D Pac-Man was the presentation of the character as an actual sphere (ironically, on the tech end, the character was a flat sprite with polygonal arms and legs). The Rev-Roll allowed Pac-Man to charge up and become a fast-moving ball similar to Metroid's Morph Ball. Our creative director designed a clever Rev-Roll pad mechanic which Pac-Man could use as either a self-powered elevator or a timed lock mechanic to open doors.
• The Butt-Bounce: the Butt-Bounce is an age-old game mechanic that's been used to death in just about every platformer ever made. The Pac-Man version was nice because, again, it emphasized the spherical appearance of the character and made the move more bouncy like a basketball.
There were also some really bad decisions made:
• Addition of non-ghost enemies: a phenomenal amount of time was wasted on the design and implementation of generic enemies that did not fit with the standard Pac-Man enemy paradigm (eating power pellets to turn the tables). This broke one of the original design pillars and added nothing to the game.
• The Pac-Dot attack: this mechanic came about as the result of a fair, but unnecessary question, "what does Pac-Man do with all those pellets he eats?" In the case of Pac-Man Ghost Zone, the original game, pellets act as a key mechanism that allows the player to unlock the next level. Since Ghost Zone didn't take place in a fixed-screen maze, this wasn't as feasible, so the Pac-Dot attack was added despite the loud protests of the design department. Pac-Man uses power pellets to kill enemies, not a pellet gun!! A better solution would have been to offer the player a self-activated power pellet for every 25 pellets eaten. This would've fit better with the character.
• Generally hasty decisions about Pac-Man's abilities hampered the ability to create more compelling level designs based on his game mechanics. A flavor-of-the-month mentality in relation to other successful games (like Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64) brought incongruent elements into the design mix. On many occasions, poor communication led to decisions that broke months of work. In one case, our manager arbitrarily changed the jump distance and broke all the planned jumps for the entire game!
I still have good relationships with a lot of the people I worked with, but there will always be that nagging question in the back of my mind, "should I have stayed to finish the project?" In the case of Pac-Man World, I resigned because I felt that the project's direction was compromising an iconic character that I held near and dear to my heart. It was a very difficult decision for me to leave the project, but I came to the realization that I loved the character more than I loved the project or the company. The day after I gave my two-week notice, on a gloomy Wintery Wednesday, my belongings were boxed up when I got back from lunch and a security guard waited to escort me outside.
When the PlayStation Museum asked me to write a post mortem, I knew I had a few things I had to get off my chest and I guess they're out now. I'd also like to take the opportunity to remember some of the other hard working folk who weren't credited: Heather Capelli (art direction, management, and scheduling), Nicole Allen (animation), Myra (level artist), Dimitri (animation), Olga (prop artist), Jill (our wonderful receptionist), and everybody on the original Ghost Zone team. I'm sorry I don't remember everybody's full names!
WRITTEN BY JASON WEESNER.
Jason has been making games since he was 10 years old. The first game he designed and programmed was a Qbert clone for his Apple II+ which was sold (given to anybody interested) at a local hobby shop. He also developed a lot of Ultima type RPG's which his Mum and Dad were very impressed by. These days, he's a senior 'jack of all trades' game designer with credits on numerous titles ranging from the Sega Genesis Little Mermaid all the way to Tomb Raider Underworld.
