Trendsetters: The 10 Most Significant Games
8/26/2008 6:16 PM | 9 Comments | Page 7 of 10
Steve Kent
Status: Writing the next great Crispy Gamer feature!
Pac-Man(Atari, 2600 -- the other versions are not applicable, 1982)
Here are the stats: 10 million people owned an Atari 2600 in 1982. Of those 10 million, 7 million purchased
Pac-Man for the 2600, unbelievably impressive market penetration. Sadly, it was not impressive enough to save Atari. The company had manufactured 12 million cartridges with the idea that basically every 2600 owner would buy the game and an additional 2 million people would buy 2600s so they could own it as well.
Though it has never been researched,
Pac-Man's 70-percent market penetration has got to be a record, but
Pac-Man's significance goes well beyond those numbers. The significance here is that
Pac-Man along with another conspicuous disaster --
E.T. -- helped bring down the entire videogame industry.
"Wow.
Pac-Man [for the] 2600 was an incredible piece of crap," says Katz, whose magazine,
Electronic Games, covered the game industry at the time. "In historical significance... I would say that
Pac-Man, with a little bit of help from
E.T., destroyed the Atari myth."
Pac-Man was based on the most successful arcade game of all-time. At the same time that the 2600 version came out,
Ms. Pac-Man was well on its way to becoming the all-time best-selling game in American arcade history.
What went wrong was that the home version of
Pac-Man was rushed. It had flickering graphics and a host of other gameplay problems. Most companies will survive a bad product, but having sold an inferior version of
Pac-Man to 70 percent of its market, Atari was mortally wounded.
In all fairness, the collapse of Intellivision, ColecoVision, Vectrex and arcades can hardly be blamed on a game for the 2600; but
Pac-Man for the 2600 most certainly helped bring about the fall of Atari's home business.
