Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition

John Constantine — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There’s no time like the present to revitalize fundamental game types. Like abstractionist painters finding new creative horizons in crafting a pristine still life, designers are going back to the well, throwing off the shackles of complex narrative and detail rich presentations to create more immediate, visceral experiences. Once June rolls around, we here in the United States will get our greedy little hands on Space Invaders Extreme and Arkanoid DS, stylized modernizations of Taito classics with gameplay rooted in thirty year-old tradition. The trend, however, kicked off one year ago when Toru Iwatani released Pac-Man Championship Edition. Iwatani’s swansong, Championship outwardly looks like little more than a gussied up version of the 1980 original. Get your hands on it, though, and Championship shows its true colors as a very different work. Championship and the original Pac-Man have the same fundamental goal: get the highest score. But Championship is a fluid, timed experience as opposed to a series of contained, linear challenges. Pac-man, the ghosts, the light house-techno music, the pulsing of the screen all increase in tempo as the clock winds down and the score rises, creating a hypnotic effect. When you make a mistake and it’s all momentarily halted, it’s jarring and drives you to keep the experience uninterrupted.

I claimed to Pete earlier this year that Pac-Man Championship was the best game I played in 2007. I still think that’s true. It is gaming at its purest: simple, elegant, and beautifully affecting.

Have you played it, FPSers? Do you agree? Am I mad?

Editor's note: Pete finally played it about a month back and told me, "It's just Pac-man." What an ass.

61 Frames Per Second : arkanoid ds

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition