Commandment 2 of the Miser Manifesto reads:

2. You don’t guess what a developer had in mind when they made something. Nor do you guess how they pulled it off (you will guess wrong).



One of the intended implications of this is that, no matter how old a game is, it’s only as good as it’s presented to you in the present. That means a game that’s great for its time, but has since become outdated or obsolete, doesn’t need praising on grounds of some vague notion of “influence” — no matter how clever you think the designers might have been. If you simply claim to be playing a game to grade its quality, then, as always, only fun matters. As has been said, what was once groundbreaking is now… broken ground.

All that said, a lot of games are simply invoked as being good. Ms. Pac-man is high among that pantheon. In a way, I think that that almost denigrates its influence: it’s a game I wish got the respect of a re-evaluation. Ms. Pac-man is a great game, unquestionably, but I have literally never seen anyone give a convincing explanation of what makes it so unanimously, infinitely appealing.

To show you what isn’t convincing, let us first look at what the fine journalists at GamesRadar proposed as its secret:

“The colorful characters, distinct sound effects, and musical interludes stuck with players long after they saw the Game Over screen, but it was the gameplay that kept pulling them back one quarter at a time. The act of navigating a yellow circle over smaller yellow circles was easy to grasp, but the tension slowly built with each new ghost that was released into the maze.” [1]

Impressive how they managed to say so little in so many words. I like that much is made over visuals, sound, and accessibility, and the most that gets said of the gameplay is that “it kept pulling them back” and was “easy to grasp.” Well, if it was so damn enticing, why don’t you say a thing or two about it!

“What makes _____ great is a weekly feature that goes through GamesRadar’s list of the 100 best games of all time and highlights different titles, explaining why they’re on the list, what makes them so amazing, and why we love them so much.” [1]

You sure dropped the ball there! Unless you only praise games if they have tension and “distinct” sound effects.

Again, I alluded to one of the reasons I think this non-criticism is so omnipresent in my Manifesto. Your typical person — and for games writers, “typical” is above the industry average — will describe a game by its graphics, its sound effects, the context to what happened, and the actions they were able to perform. This works for a game like Far Cry or Galaga, where “sneak through the jungle,” “advanced burn physics,” and “double up your ship” are enough to convince a person to play it.

But that’s not getting at the game part of the game, the part where you strategize and think and play. I mean, burn physics are… nifty, but they’re a source of technical awe; what’s really fun are the ways you can use wind and the arrangement of burnable materials to kill enemies. Same goes with doubling your ship in Galaga: it’s a cool context, but it’s also an interesting gameplay scenario: you sacrifice a life to double your firepower. I won’t say context doesn’t matter — compare how fun it is to break the law and fight off the fuzz in Grand Theft Auto against killing generic nondescript enemy factions in Far Cry or Red Faction — but unless your core systems are fun to begin with, your game isn’t very good as a game.

And this has to apply to Ms. Pac-man, clearly. One of the secret truths they don’t teach you in game journalism school is that, as much as Tetris and Breakout, Ms. Pac-man is a totally abstract game. Nothing about it is concrete: you’re a circle navigating a series of alternating one-dimensional line segments while avoiding the state of game termination. The fact that the ghosts are a recognizable creature is basically irrelevant: they could be anything. Yet, ironically, the characters are the thing people remember most. There are Pac-man Funko pops, keychains, laptop stickers, and parkas, as if the game were ever fun because of its context. Likewise, the sound effects, however enjoyable, however #iconic, however distinct, never brought anybody back to play another round. It’s too rare to see someone who realizes that the game is exactly as fun without music, or with all of its visuals replaced with differently colored squares.

I like the Tetris comparison here, because it reveals something that both games have in common. Ms. Pac-man and Tetris do a better job than almost any other games I’ve played at testing your management skills at the same time as your manual dexterity. Plenty of sims and strategy games do the former, most games do the latter to some degree, but none hit the same high note along both frequencies the way that Ms. Pac-man does.

Of Tetris and Ms. Pac-man, Ms. Pac-man is more modal. The amount of danger in Tetris at any given time is continuous — you’ll never have the blocks suddenly stack from the bottom to near the top. In Ms. Pac-man, you are always switching back and forth between moments of peril and reprieve. At one moment you’re hurriedly collecting pellets while the ghosts are on the opposite end of the screen. A minute later, you might lure them towards you before you eat a power-up pellet. But something goes wrong — perhaps the orange ghost turns unexpectedly and forces you to make a difficult series of turns. After a narrow escape, you get to turn the tables and chase the ghosts, waiting for the precise moment before you spring on them, then maneuvering quickly to eat as many as you can.

You can see the dynamics, from maximizing safe time, to actively manipulating the ghosts, swerving around them when the unexpected happens, and then finally earning another safe moment. “Run from, then eat, the ghosts” is the mythic, oft-discussed Pac-man gameplay loop, but it’s not the only way the game can go. The game is full of micro-moments that heighten your reflexes, challenge your sense of logistics, or tempt you into risking a life just to clear a row of pellets. It’s an incredibly deep chase game with plenty of emergent scenarios that each feel unique, requiring you to take safe risks, plan ahead, and be prepared to respond at a moment’s notice.

The genuine strategic depth of the game stems from the movement of the ghosts. The maze structure means that, if there are two ghosts near you, as long as you’re closer to a fork in the road than the ghosts are, you always have at least one path that lets you escape. Therefore, your focus is not on choosing the right path — pathfinding happens to be a skill most people can manage easily. It’s pathfinding without allowing the possibility that a third ghost can block your intended flight plan.

You may or may not know that the ghosts move according to different variations on a simple algorithm, and not based on any preset pattern. Blinky, the red ghost, always chases your character. Pinky chases a point four tiles ahead of you (unless you’re facing up, in which case he’ll target four squares up and four squares left, due to a bug). Inky’s targeting is the most complicated. His target is determined by the positioning of the red ghost, and a point two squares ahead of the player character. It’s easier seen than visualized. Finally, Sue’s target changes depending on her proximity to the player. If she’s more than 8 tiles from your Pac-person, she targets you, just like Blinky; if she’s closer than 8 tiles, she instead targets the bottom-left corner of the screen. [2]

What does this actually mean to a player? First of all, all of the ghosts move in completely different styles. Everyone who’s played Ms. Pac-man a few times has a sense for this, even if they can’t put into exact words what the differences are. Given that Blinky targets you directly, he usually chases right behind you, while Sue (or Clyde, in the original Pac-man) usually… doesn’t seem to do anything related to you at all. Pinky often ends up cutting you off since his target is just ahead of you, but he occasionally goes on weird tangents when he could easily have kept chasing you instead. Inky makes erratic and unpredictable movements, sometimes cutting you off, chasing you directly, or totally ignoring you. Whether you know how his targeting works or not, he’s the most inscrutable ghost, but he’s still dangerous. Because of the peculiarity of his targeting, he tends to get closer to you the closer Blinky gets, meaning that he’ll eventually find his way towards you. Meanwhile, Sue tends to act like she’s on the far end of the moon with her thumb up her ass. Tallying this all up, the game has an aggressive and predictable ghost (Blinky), a semi-confrontational and predictable ghost (Pinky), an erratic, unpredictable, but aggressive ghost (Inky), and a non-aggressive, psychotic ghost (lovely Sue).

This is often considered the first use of proper AI in a video game, and I think it’s the biggest single contributor to Ms. Pac-man’s quality. The ghosts synergize in innumerable ways, like how Pinky so often ends up boxing you in with Blinky or Inky, or how Sue often ends up catching the player totally off-guard because she wasn’t taken seriously (bah! women!!). It’s always easy to juke out Pinky and Blinky, given that you can easily predict where they are going to go. But it’s past the point of average human processing power to figure out where Inky is going, so you have to account for his every contingency in a very quick amount of time — or you could just try (hope) to avoid the ghosts altogether.

As an illustration, I’ve highlighted the likely paths the ghosts might take in the picture above. Let’s assume that Ms. Pac-man’s next target is the bunch of bananas: if she takes the path I’ve outlined, where is she likely to end up? Since Blinky takes a clear, direct path, we can assume in good confidence where he’ll be in a few moments’ time. We can also state confidently that Sue will be nowhere near worth worrying about. Pinky, on the other hand, has two different paths. In one case, he gets quite close to the player; in the, he goes down a side avenue. It’s extremely important to account for both possibilities, since, if Ms. Pac-man does go for the bananas, there’s a good chance Pinky won’t be far away. Not only that, but if she goes to where the bananas are, then Blinky’s optimal path will be to go down the tunnel — meaning not one, but two ghosts will be very close to Ms. Pac-man by the time she gets to the fruit. The fruit moves too, though, so she should be able to nab the bananas and escape safely, with some quick footwork. Finally, notice how much more complicated Inky is. In this still picture, we can reason out his target and infer that he’ll travel up, then left, then up again; if we were playing real-time, though, we wouldn’t so easily reason this out. To be cautious, we would have to mentally check whether Inky has any chance of getting close to us soon (he doesn’t), and steel ourselves to out-maneuver him if necessary. It’s these kinds of advanced decision-making hoops — identifying threats and non-threats and making the best possible calls to minimize risk based on ghost behavior– that make Ms. Pac-man consistently compelling.

To clarify, it’s true that all of this information on exactly how the ghosts move wasn’t known for years after the game came out. By now it’s become common knowledge. You might say that this nullifies any claim that manipulating the ghosts is a major reason the game is fun, since no one knew how to do it for decades. But even if you don’t know exactly how it’s mathemagically determined, a skilled player still has a better intuitive sense of how they’ll move — that the red ghost is more aggressive, the pink ghost sometimes ignores you, and so on. So, while knowledge is power, playing well makes you even more powerful. And not only is Ms. Pac-man playable (dare I say fun) if you don’t know how the ghosts target, it’s not ruined if you do see behind the curtain. It’s a show of quality, a show of just how many strategies are both feasible and fun to execute, that Ms. Pac-man can be played at an extremely high level without behind-the-scenes knowledge of how everything operates.

One of the advanced strategies in a game of Ms. Pac-man involves getting all of the ghosts into a uniform group, since it’s easier to run away from four ghosts operating as one than four wildly varied ones [4]. You wouldn’t think this is possible, since Sue and Inky are so hard to control, but Inky can be corralled. Because his target is, basically speaking, protracted along the same trajectory as Blinky’s target (you), Inky moves more and more like Blinky the closer he is to Blinky. And Sue can be controlled, if necessary, if you position yourself between her and the bottom of the screen, or if you put a lot of distance between you and the cluster of ghosts — though it’s also effective to ignore her altogether. Of course, ignoring Sue not only leaves her a loose cannon, but also reduces the number of points you can score using each power pellet. It’s a clever choice that the ghosts give point amounts that increase exponentially: that way, eating every ghost isn’t rewarded proportionately to eating just three, as, obviously, the former is much harder than the latter. (And don’t try to tell me that scores are archaic, you millennial shits. When you’re playing Ms. Pac-man, score is everything.)

As a counterbalance to the ghosts’ complex movement patterns, Ms. Pac-man is a game that only allows for a select few inputs anywhere on-screen. What’s more, once you’ve gone down a sealed corridor, your only option is turning around. One of the more significant advantages the player has over the ghosts is that the ghosts will (almost) never turn around. This cuts down the number of contingencies the player actually has to calculate for, and it’s one of the first areas in which a novice player will sharpen up his skills. Tricking a foe into going down a useless path, and knowing that they’re stuck down it, is the special advantage of the human over the animals, after all; in fact, when it comes to Pac-man, of all things, the fact that you can turn around might be your single biggest advantage.

In addition to the default chase mode I’ve been describing, the ghosts will occasionally perform a reversal, which happen at 5 and 20 seconds intervals into every stage. I’m not fond of these, since, unless you skillfully time your one-miss-i-sip-pis, these are semi-unpredictable to the player. Reversals also happen when you eat a power pellet, making them the most direct control you have over the motions of the ghosts, and your most powerful tool for both offense and defense. I used to be upset that the ghosts don’t flash blue and become edible after the nineteenth levels — you’re forgetting the game’s classic loop! — but I’ve come to appreciate it. As you last longer and longer, the game gets stingy with the airtime it gives you, until eventually it’s non-stop suffocation. A good player, then, can’t depend on invincibility; he needs to leverage his skills to earn other kinds of reprieves. A higher level of strategy is demanded. Metaphorically, you’re not just fighting to knock the other guy on his ass, you’re fighting to win every little parry. The benefit of having enemies that seem to have a mind of their own is that you have to play against them like you would a quirky, living opponent.

Over the course of a game, the speed of all the characters in the game increases, meaning you need to think faster and faster to keep yourself alive. Obviously, this is an effective way of piling on the difficulty, since it means level 37 requires you to use the exact same skills level 1 does, only faster. In addition, the red ghost gets a speed boost in every round after a certain number of pellets remain on-screen, a mode referred to online by the alias “Cruise Elroy.” This serves two purposes. It means you need to make better, safer decisions when you’re near the end of a maze (amplifying the tension those wise GamesRadar writers zeroed in on), and it punishes you for lollygagging, forcing aggressive, riskier moves. It also makes Blinky more interesting, since the threat of “follow directly behind you” doesn’t require special consideration if he moves slower than you can.

Besides speed, Ms. Pac-man has other advantages. Not only can she turn around, she can stop herself on walls hit head-on, useful for luring and waiting out undesirable arrangements of ghosts. At all points in the game, you have access to the tunnels, which slow ghosts down and fuck up their targeting. Much like the power pellets, they’re key for both defense and offense. Finally, you corner better than the ghosts do — meaning that if you perform the directional inputs perfectly at every junction, you’ll manage to outrun them. This basically makes ever turn a quiz on your dexterity, but it also makes certain routes riskier: you can always outspeed the ghosts if you turn a corner perfectly, but if you fuck up, the ghosts will get that extra bit closer. Additionally, this makes straightaways more interesting than… well, straight lines. Because you can’t stack up passive cornering boosts, it’s oftentimes safer to take a side path, or to do a long straight section in multiple chunks, than to continue straight down all at once.

There’s one other way Ms. Pac-man’s speed varies from the ghosts’. Simple though it is, I think this subtlety is so genius, it should be locked up like a secret ingredient; it’s the spice that’s kept the game memorable all these years. You ready for this?

Ms. Pacman moves slightly slower when eating pellets.

What this means is that every time you’re making progress towards beating a stage, you are making yourself more vulnerable. That generates a deep strategic tension. If you’re moving through the stage unimpeded, you’re also playing the board inefficiently, giving the ghosts more time to kill you, but when you’re progressing, you slow yourself down. Whether a pathway contains pellets or not can be the difference between outspeeding a ghost and being killed. It also means that the longer you let yourself get directly chased for (without diverting ghosts, going through a tunnel or using an energizer), the closer the ghosts will get. Without this inclusion (indeed, many inferior home console ports have neglected it), the game loses a fundamental strategic element. It matters less what route Ms. Pac-man takes, it matters less whether you choose to make escape routes or not, it matters less how long you travel in a single direction, how well you maximize safe times, and how well you’re able to stall. Because it’s included, it also complicates where you choose to clear pellets: if you clear everything but the corners, then the board is comparatively safer, but you’ll have to traverse the entire open board to finish the stage. This is also brilliant from a level design perspective: notice that, in every one of Ms. Pac-man’s boards, the only cleared space at the beginning of the level is right in front of the ghosts’ lair. Last of all, this system means that a decision you made during moment one of the game can effect your ability to escape later on, increasing the impact of your decisions across time and tightening the integration of every moment of gameplay.

All of this — the semi-deterministic idiosyncrasies of the ghosts’ movements, Ms. Pac-man’s slight advantages in maneuverability, the fact that every plan of attack can turn instantaneously from offense to defense and back again — it adds up to a game that really is balanced. When I say “balanced”, I don’t just mean that the game gives even outcomes (you’d never put your money on the ghosts over a skilled human). I mean that the game is reflective of a player’s skill across levels: someone who’s better at the game will consistently score better, even in the face of the game’s quasi-random chaos. There are no strategies that will always grant victory, but the ability to refine consistent game plans is rewarded. And strategies which are more complicated, techniques that require more thought to pull off, opportunities that are harder to detect, give longer safe times, more points, and greater rewards than aimlessly fleeing.

“Across skill levels” is a key phrase. It’s the reason why skill a high skill ceiling is cherished in any game, while a high skill floor is so often forgiven (git gud, faggot). Everyone can compete at Ms. Pac-man, and no one will ever get so good that they can’t improve and can’t be beaten. Ms. Pac-man, like Tetris, actually has multiple tiers of player skill: the beginner’s tier where the game appears totally chaotic; the intermediate tier, where ways you can lure, trick, and manipulate ghosts start to become apparent; the advanced tier, where grouping ghosts to stay alive as long as possible becomes the central strategic battlefront; and the really advanced tier, where… well, I’m no expert.

If depth is dependent on the quantity of meaningfully different possible game states, then there’s a reason most people’s conception of depth depends so heavily on that old cliché about taking “a lifetime to master.” It’s because, in a deep game, you can spend a lifetime exploring and refining better and better strategies and combinations of strategies — but, again, things have to be meaningfully different. To put it another way: every single arrangement of ghosts in Ms. Pac-man should prompt a totally different list of possible options in a player’s mind. Not only that, but those options will be different depending on the players’ knowledge of ghost AI and his prioritization of goals. That list, and the option that gets chosen, will vary differently between different skill levels. And the quest towards perfect efficiency with minimal risk continues.

It’s worth pointing out that Ms. Pac-man is also one of the greatest sequels ever made. This, despite the fact that it made only a few changes to the original Pac-man. It’s an incredible refinement on ideas that already worked beautifully: the way your character moves, the programming on the ghosts, the dynamics involved in using the energizers, and the strategies that emerge as you start to master all of the above, are relatively unchanged.

There are three significant changes that make Ms. Pac-man a superior game. The first is that the mazes change. The original game inevitably starts to feel staid after a couple levels, so the new mazes are a blessed inclusion. The second is that the fruits actually move around the screen, rather than staying still in the middle. I like this change because it gives you something else to pay attention to, rather than adding another waypoint to your existing route. Finally, a subtler change is that Blinky and Pinky move randomly until the first reversal; this small change single-handedly eliminates a dominant strategy. The original Pac-man, at the very highest level, has become a contest of executing a calculated pattern. Top players no longer compete for high score, but for low time. Even on the Genesis port of Ms. Pac-man, I’ve found myself being able to memorize the ghosts’ preset starting movements. But because Blinky and Pinky move truly randomly in arcade Ms. Pac-man, their arrangements are always different, and the game is, rightfully, a test of skill, not rote dexterity.

A moment should be spared to talk about how damn good the maps are in Ms. Pac-man. The first map is a perfect introductory level: there’s only one long segment that lacks branching paths, at the very top of the screen, and the energizers are set up so that it’s very easy to lure the ghosts inside. Most of the board gives you immediate access between one long corridor and another, but there are two segments on both the top and bottom of the screen that don’t let you switch lanes as the crow would fly. The second stage incorporates several more long, unbranched passages, but it gives you much shorter tracks to circumvent each. The tunnels and energizers are also positioned more awkwardly. The third stage eliminates two features of the first two stages: first, the number of tunnels is dropped to just one, and second, there are no four-way intersections, meaning every junction is more likely to have ever road blocked. Oddly, the only long, sealed line of pellets here is right underneath you from the start, begging for you to scoop them up right away. Finally, the fourth stage has especially awkward tunnels and doesn’t have any long straightaways. Everything is broken up, reducing the number of “lane switches” you have available. If you can clear all four stages, the twelfth stage resets to the original map, at which point the levels cycle till the killscreen.

Having written that entire paragraph, I think it’s pretty telling that, in the end, fans have given Ms. Pac-man what it deserves: never-ending new maps. Randomizers and fan-made map packs can be found online easily. The fact that the level design is almost irrelevant as long as you’re playing consistently is testament to just how incredible Ms. Pac-man is.



Another testament is the fact that the game’s success has never been replicated. I guarantee that, unless you’ve looked at the Wikipedia article for yourself, there are so many more Pac-man sequels than you expect there’d be. There’s point-and-click adventures, trivia games, multiple different series of platformers (fucking WHY), and — fittingly enough for this post — Tetris clones. But the most interesting in the context of this review is the sheer quantity of failed revivals and revitalizations that’ve tried to recapture the same magic from the very first and second games. Jr. Pac-man, Pac-mania, Pac-man Arrangement, Ms. Pac-man Maze Madness, and the… uh, distinct Pac-man VR have all attempted to recreate the magic, and none succeeded, for reasons as varied as the games themselves. Because when it comes to balance, strategic depth, and raw excitement, Pac-man might have germinated the idea’s fertile seed. But Ms. Pac-man is the fucking tits.

Which takes me back to my original thesis: no game tests management and dexterity quite like Ms. Pac-man. It’s got subtle design brilliancies coursing through its veins that demand the LEETest strategies you can bring. It’s a vivacious simulated ecosystem with enemies that feel more alive than the ones from most games released this year. It’s got an incredible sense of balance that welcomes new players and war-scared veterans alike. It’s one of those games that I don’t think will ever not be fun, because its design gives it as many interesting, unique-seeming scenarios as chess, or pool, or Tetris. The secret to Ms. Pac-man‘s enduring delight isn’t in the characters, it isn’t in the tension, it isn’t even in the fact that you switch back and forth from being chased to chasing. It’s this simple: it reduces spatial maneuvering to its abstract essence, and expects you to make the absolute most of your capabilities to move through space to survive.

Websites Cited and Consulted:

[1] https://www.gamesradar.com/why-ms-pac-man-one-greatest-games-all-time/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQK7PmR8kpQ

[3] http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU7HPrItng4

[5] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/post-mortem-ms-pac-man-diablo-dissected-by-their-original-devs/

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7-SHTktjJc