pac-man

It's good to have hobbies. Some people just have more unusual hobbies than others. Michael Birken says he spent 11 months playing with Post-it notes. He wasn't writing memos or reminders, he was sticking them on the wall to create an elaborate stop-motion video tribute to his favorite classic games. He calls it Post-it Note Arcade.

The video includes footage of both Ms. Pac-Man and Mario. Birken says he recorded actual gameplay footage and then printed the images out, one frame at a time, to replicate on the walls around his office. He spent holidays and weekends posting the little pieces of paper up and filming the results. It's probably just as well his co-workers didn't have to witness this madness.… Read more

Already on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art and released as a fully playable Google Doodle, Pac-Man has finally made its way to Android.

Known as Pac-Man + Tournaments, the gameplay is a faithful rendition of the classic '80s arcade game and includes all 256 levels. It also includes a tournament mode that includes new mazes, and keeps track of rankings and achievements for a modern twist. Best of all, it's free. If you're ready to relive the '80s, grab a roll of quarters, flip up your shirt collar, and press Start.… Read more

The Smithsonian's "Art of Video Games" exhibit has now closed, but games will be on display at another high-profile art museum beginning early next year.

New York's Museum of Modern Art has announced that it's chosen 40 games to display at a new game-specific gallery.

Games selected for display at MoMA go back decades and include the likes of Pac-Man and Spacewar, but also contemporary releases such as Portal and Minecraft.

The games will be on display as part of the museum's Architecture and Design collection at the establishment's Johnson Galleries beginning in … Read more

Forget Mars! NASA has discovered signs of video gaming on a moon of Saturn. Recently released images from the Cassini mission show features on the icy moon of Thethys that look suspiciously like a famous '80s arcade creation.

The Pac-Man image was discovered in thermal data provided by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer. You can read up on the nifty high-energy electrons bombardment theory for the shape over at NASA. The findings were published in the journal Icarus.… Read more

Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray to Pac-Man my ghosts to eat. If I should level up before I wake, I pray to Donkey Kong my barrels to take. Sleep tight, little geeks, and pull your old-school arcade blankets up to your chins.

You can get your blanket from Etsy, of course. Seller iamduckydale makes classic game blankets and throws. The Donkey Kong blanket is especially impressive, with the iconic ape at the top and Mario leaping a barrel near the bottom. It's the most intricate of the collection and the most expensive at $260.… Read more

The phrase "immersive experience" gets bandied about quite a bit, but it's often an overstatement -- unless you happen to be in a room completely surrounded by a fully playable Ms. Pac-Man game.

Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari Damacy, got to experiment with a variety of video games for the recent Babycastles Summit at the Museum of Art & Design in New York.

Takahashi's new take on Ms. Pac-Man involved projecting it onto the walls and ceiling of a room. It looks like what would happen if Tron and Ms. Pac-Man got together, minus the glowing skin-tight suits.… Read more

A gentleman's timepiece should never be too exuberant, but Crave feels compelled to give a curious nod to the ultra-expensive Pac-Man and Space Invaders watches by Swiss timepiece crafter RJ-Romain Jerome. Each dial features a miniature replica design of the arcade classics set in a pixelated appearance.

Perhaps understated from first glance, these geeky watches (waterproof to 98 feet) with rubber straps contain some real stellar inspirations. For starters, each steel timepiece features real fragments of the Apollo 11 lunar module, and the designer took it a step further by modeling the four joints of the watch after lunar landing module legs. To top off the extravagance, the back of the watches contain low-oxidation silver mixed with real moon rocks, specially patterned like the lunar surface. … Read more

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--There was a time, not all that long ago, when the only way to play a decent (or indeed most any) "computer game" was to seek one out at a local pizza parlor or bowling alley--or, if you were lucky and your neighborhood had been blessed with such an establishment, the local arcade.

In fact, computer games weren't computer games yet. They were video games, or arcade games.

I can remember the excitement my friends and I felt when our neighborhood suddenly witnessed the arrival of a "real" video arcade. Space Invaders had been around for a while by then (how cool was it that the Pretenders had recorded an instrumental in its honor, complete with a sampling of the game's throbbing, threatening sound effects?). But the newly opened Louie's brought us a startling array of bright, beeping, and then-revolutionary games with strange and thrilling names like Pac-Man and Centipede.… Read more

For the last 30 years, Pac-Man's estranged wife, Ms. Pac-Man, has been consuming countless coins and hours from gamers at arcades across North America.

Philipp Rohlfshagen, David Robles, and Simon Lucas, all of the University of Essex, recently launched a competition called Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghost Team for those wanting to rewrite the flow of the classic chomper. The contest, held last week in New Orleans at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2011, was an open call for savvy Java programmers to create artificial intelligence routines that either control where Ms. Pac-Man or the four ghosts should go during gameplay. If you can't beat them, hack them.

Programming a successful strategy for a game like Ms. Pac-Man in real time is very complicated (click here for the software). A more competitive version of Ms. Pac-Man was used in the exhibition; fruits were omitted and the speed of Ms Pac-Man and the ghosts were identical. Entrants to the competition weren't allowed to use screen captures to navigate. They were required to directly interface with the game engine instead.… Read more