PacMan (Anthony van Tonder)

Pac-Man

A historical tribute and accurate remake of the original Pac-Man arcade game

Play

You can play the game on all canvas-enabled browsers. Touch controls are enabled for mobile browsers. The game is resolution-independent and smoothly scales to fit the size of any screen. Performance may increase by shrinking the window or zooming in with your browser.

Main Controls

• swipe: steer pacman on mobile browsers
• arrows: steer pacman
• end: pause the game
• escape: open in-game menu

Confirmed Desktop Browers

• Microsoft Edge
• Firefox
• Chrome

Games

Each of the following games are playable from the main menu.

• Pac-Man: 1980 original arcade by Namco.
• Ms. Pac-Man: 1981 Pac-Man modification by GCC/Midway.
• Crazy Otto: GCC's unreleased, in-house version of Ms. Pac-Man before it was sold to Midway.
• Cookie-Man: a brand new version of Ms. Pac-Man with a sophisticated procedural map generator.

Turbo Mode

Each game has an alternate mode called Turbo (a.k.a. Speedy mode). This is a popular hardware modification of the game found in many of the original arcade cabinets. In this mode, Pac-Man travels about twice as fast (same speed as the disembodied eyes of the ghosts) and is not slowed down when eating pellets.

High Scores

High scores for each game (normal and turbo separately) are stored on your local machine by your browser.

Learn Mode

Learn Mode allows you to visualize the behaviors of the ghosts. (The colored square represents the ghost bait.)

Practice Mode

This mode allows you to practice the game with special features. You can go into slow-motion or rewind time with the special onscreen buttons or the hotkeys listed below. (The time-manipulation controls and design were borrowed from the game Braid). You can also turn on invincibility or ghost visualizers from the menu.

Practice Controls

• shift: hold down to rewind (a la Braid)
• 1: hold down to slow down the game to 0.5x
• 2: hold down to slow down the game to 0.25x
• o: toggle pacman turbo mode
• p: toggle pacman attract mode (autoplay)
• i: toggle pacman invincibility
• n: go to next level
• q,w,e,r,t: toggle target graphic for blinky, pinky, inky, clyde, and pacman, respectively.
• a,s,d,f,g: toggle path graphic for blinky, pinky, inky, clyde, and pacman, respectively.

Procedurally-Generated Maps

In the Cookie-Man game mode, the mazes change as often as they do in Ms. Pac-Man, but are procedurally generated. Each level has a pre-defined color palette, granting an element of consistency to the random structure of the mazes.

Algorithm Description

The mazes are built carefully to closely match design patterns deduced from the original maps found in Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.

Credits:

Original Games

Thanks to the original Pac-Man team at Namco for creating such an enduring game. And thanks to the MAME team for their arcade emulator and very helpful debugge