Pac & Pal was the second official Pac sequel to  come from Namco, and it was also the least popular one. If you thought Super Pac had it bad in the home console department, Pac & Pal got almost nothing. No console ports and portable ports... and unlike all the other official Pac-Mans, it wasn't allowed in any of the Namco Museum games for the PSX. Only in 1998 did it finally get an official release that could be played at home, in emulated form on the "Namco History" collection made for Japanese PCs.
 
Did the game deserve this? Well... it's actually a pretty decent game. When playing it, however, it's not to hard to see why it was so quickly forgotten. It's really kind of funny... Over in America, Midway's unofficial sequels kept sticking to the form of eating dots, which everyone knew Pac-Man for, but the original creators kept taking Pac in weird directions.
 
The concept of door-opening action from Super Pac-Man is what Namco decided to build off of for this game. In each stage is nine cards which Pac must flip over. By doing so, he'll unlock a path leading to an item he must "eat". Once again, the ghosts are back with the intent to kill Pac-man, which is the only thing that carried over through all of Namco's games. Not only are the pellets still gone, but the power pellets have been taken out of the picture as well, so Pac has to find a new way to fight the ghosts. Among the items Pac can unlock are two powerups which come in a form of a sprites from other Namco games like Galaxian and Rally-X. With these, he can stun the ghosts and render them harmless for a short time.
 
The "Pal" of the game is a fifth ghost named Mil, who "helps" Pac-man by running around and collecting the items Pac has cleared a path to. In theory, this will help Pac clear the stage faster, though what she's really doing is preventing him from eating the item himself, thereby depriving the player of the points the item offers. It especially sucks when she steals the power-up item.
 
And that's it. Eat nine items in each stage without dying, and move on... Like with Super Pac-man, bonus levels were added as well, but once again, the playfield does not change with each stage. It's a more decently-made game than Super Pac (and it even has background music!), but it suffers from the same problem of not having nearly the lasting appeal the original had. You'll have fun playing about 20 rounds of it, and then that's it. You've had your fill of Pac & Pal for an entire lifetime.
 
Though it's tricky to get information on this, it seems that there was never an official release of this game outside of Japan. There is some evidence that they may have planned on it in the form of the "Pac-Man & Chomp Chomp" romset available on the Intertron. It looks like this was an official clone release by Namco meant to captialize on the Pac-Man cartoon which came out in '82. It's a pretty fair guess that they hoped to enter the game into the US market with this version, but no US distributor was interested. Atari was a bit ailing by 1983, and Midway had their own plans for the Pac-Man franchise...

Jr. Pac-Man

Platform	Developer	Publisher
Arcade	Midway	Bally Midway

 
Well, here we go again! Yet another family member is being pursued by ghosts, this one being Pac Jr., although it may in fact be an older version of Pac-Baby, as the opening cinema implies. This was a very difficult game with large mazes that were so big, horizantal scrolling became necessary. The ghosts proved to be quite smart in this game, and Jr. didn't get the help of escape tunnels like his mom and dad did. Even with the help of two extra power pellets, it's REALLY hard to make it far in this game.
 
Aside from the larger playfield, the graphics were improved slightly. The "fruits" (consisting of cute items like bicycles) bounced around like the did in Ms. Pac and also had some weird effect on the pellets, changing into "bulky" pellets which slowed Jr. down. Clyde once again sits this game out, and another orange ghost named Tim takes his place. Alas, Tim the Ghost was not very popular, and we never saw him again.
 
Really, the best thing about the game wasn't the gameplay; it was the adorable intermissions. In them, Jr. finds love in Yum-Yum, a young lady ghost. It's a romance the parents don't approve of, so the two run off and elope Romeo & Juliet style. Alas, it was really hard for the player to see them all due to the game's difficulty.

Professor Pac-Man

Platform	Developer	Publisher
Arcade	Midway	Bally Midway

According to Midway, Quiz games were going to be huge, and they had to get in it on the ground floor. They'd be the kings of the gigantic Quiz Game industry. They would have enough piles of money to fill a pool. Everyone would love them. Countless girls would sleep with them. For you see, their grand plan was to make a quiz game that included Pac-Man. Quiz games were going to be immensely popular, and Pac-Man WAS immensely popular. How could they lose? Tons of units would be made, to be included in arcades, bars, and casinos. People would love them so much and play them so often, they'd have to upgrade the machines every four months to keep the questions fresh and new, so that people could continue to play and enjoy the game for years and years. Which they would. It was going to be glorious. GLORIOUS.
 
This was the last Pac-Man spinoff Midway ever developed.

Pac-Land

Platform	Developer	Publisher
Arcade	Namco	Namco (Japan) Bally Midway (US, 1984)

By this time, arcade games have progressed pretty far. They were now powerful enough to allow the Pac-Man seen on the Japanese arcade cabinets and flyers, the one with the arms and legs and cheerful expression, to finally star in a game.
 
The plot was pretty thin... Somehow a fairy ended up in Pac's hat, and she needs help getting home. To help her, all Pac needs to do is take a walk through the single most dangerous, ghost-ridden city ever. When he makes it to the Land of Fairies, the Fairy Princess rewards him by using her omnipotent power to give him Super Flying Shoes, so that Pac-Man can skip back home, trying to ignore the disturbing fact that the town's layout somehow changed. After this nonsense, Pac-Man decides to move, only to end up in an even more dangerous city than before, which also has its own stray fairy and fairy princess... And it goes on like this, forever, until the city becomes so dangerous, that there's no way for Pac to avoid getting killed.
 
Pac-Land was not a very good game. Each area had a simple layout and pretty frustrating enemy placements. The control was pretty bad too, and it's not any wonder why the scheme of "press a button to move and tap it to run" never caught on. Nonetheless, it did prove to be a decent success, and it helped pioneer the whole genre of the "run & jump" platform game later made awesome by you-know-who.
 
This game was inspired by the Hanna-Barbera cartoon which debuted in '82, although not many know that there were actually two versions made in the arcade, the second one using slightly altered graphics that are a closer match to the cartoon. Both versions had the catchy cartoon theme playing in the background. All home ports reverted back to the original graphics.
 
The game had power pellets, but they always appeared right before the checkpoints, so the only way to punish the ghosts for their torment was to backtrack, and that was no fun. Also, there are some strange religious overtones with Pac-Man stopping by what is clearly a Christian church at each checkpoint. I'm not sure what THAT was about...
 
Pac-Land ended up being the last Pac game to be distributed in the US by Midway. After this, Namco got a controlling interest in Atari, forming a stronger partnership with the company and making them their arcade distributor for a little while. Namco also started forming an American branch and tried their hand at distributing the games themselves. Plus, they were probably a bit embarrased by Professor Pac-man.

Pac-Man

Platform	Developer	Publisher
Intellivision	Atari	Atarisoft INTV (1984)
PC DOS	Atari	Atarisoft Thunder Mountain (1988)
Commodore 64	Atari	Atarisoft Thunder Mountain (1988)
Vic-20	Atari	Atarisoft
Apple	Atari	Atarisoft
TI99/4A	Atari	Atarisoft
Spectrum	Atari	Atarisoft

ATARISOFT, your label has been formed to distribute as many third-party games to as many systems as we can to try and help our ailing company! Among our goals is to release a version of Pac-Man for every system out there! Do you accept this mission!?

Ms. Pac-Man

Platform	Developer	Publisher
400/800	Atari	Atari
5200	Atari	Atari

Released early in the year as a follow-up to their Pac-Man ports. Again, these proved to be pretty solid ports, and it was unfortunate that the player had to deal with that 5200 controller.


Pac-Man

Platform	Developer	Publisher
MSX	Namco	Namcot (Japan)
NES	Namco	Namcot (Japan) Tengen (US, 1988) Namco (US, 1993)

Namco won't be creating any new Pac-Man games for a few years, but fortunately, Japan has finally gotten into the home console market, and they have the business of console porting to occupy their time. They created the "Namcot" label to do so, and nobody seems to know what the extra "T" at the end was supposed to mean. Seriously, nobody. Odds are, even if you went and asked the current president of Namco Bandai about it, he'd say "Uhhhhhh... Never mind that! Let's go eat sushi and play Pachinko..."
Anyway...
 
The MSX and Famicom versions of Pac-Man each had their own set of limitations... The MSX with its one-color sprites and the Famicom with its crazy-limited color palette. But these were still pretty darn good home ports for their time, especially when compared to what the US has been getting.
 
Pac-Man was among the first games released for the Famicom, but its NES release was way delayed, due to the NES itself being brought to American shores two years after its Japanese counterpart, and Namco's partner Atari not getting into the game until a couple years later. It ended up being one of the three officialy-licensed games Atari released for the NES. Then, of course, the big old hissy fight between Atari and Nintendo took place, and the game was no longer considered an official release. Namco finally alleviated this with their own official release, nearly ten years after the game was made! Needless to say, the port didn't look all that impressive by 1993. But oh well.

Ms. Pac-Man

Platform	Developer	Publisher
PC DOS	Atari	Atarisoft Thunder Mountain (1988)
Commodore 64	Atari	Atarisoft Thunder Mountain (1988)
Vic-20	Atari	Atarisoft
Apple	Atari	Atarisoft
TI99/4A	Atari	Atarisoft
Spectrum	Atari	Atarisoft

Ms. Pac did not get to be on the Intellivision, like her husband did. She just wasn't intelligent enough for Intelligent Television. Dames, I tell ya amirite?


Pac-Land

Platform	Developer	Publisher
Famicom	Namco	Namcot (Japan)

We've hit a lull. The only Pac-related activity during '85 and '86 was this Japan-only release of an extremely early port of Namco's platform game. Unlike the original Pac-Man, Pac-Land was just way too much for the poor 1985 Famicom to handle. It becomes painfully obvious when you try to play it. But they tried. It basically plays like the arcade game with REALLY scaled-down versions of the already-simple levels, and super-tiny sprites. It's like Pac ate a reverse-Super Mushroom.

COMING SOON!

THE INCREDIBLY FUCKING COMPLETE PAC-MAN GAME LIST VERSION 2