Play Pac-Land Online Free for Arcade.

How to Play Pac-Land

The player picks up your keyboard immediately, and any connected gamepad too. Here is the full layout for Pac-Land.

The Story Behind Pac-Land

Most arcade games in Japan at the time simply used two or three frames to convey movement, which he found unconvincing. After seeing the success of Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man animated series, Namco asked Kishimoto to create an arcade game based on the show; Hanna-Barbera was not involved with the game's development beyond licensing elements related to the series. The arcade game was released in Japan in 1984, but there are conflicting release dates.

However, the United States Copyright Office and John Szczepaniak in the second volume of The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers (2015), when including biography details taken from Kishimoto's resume, lists the release date as October 1984. The game's controls were heavily influenced by Track & Field, a game that allowed the player to become faster by constantly tapping the button in succession; Kishimoto thought the idea was interesting and that it would make it stand out among other games. The game was later released in North America by Bally Midway in December 1984, and in Europe by Atari Games in early 1985.

How Pac-Land Plays

Trips consist of cities, forests, deserts and abandoned castles. Most trip sections end with a large sign saying "BREAK TIME" with a church on a hill in the background, and bonus points are awarded for jumping at certain points at the end of each section. Stages are known in-game as "trips" and are broken into four sections — the first three have Pac-Man running to return a lost fairy back to "Fairyland", and the last having Pac-Man return home to his family.

The player can find hidden items by pushing against specific objects in certain stages, including a helmet that protects Pac-Man from falling mini ghosts, an item that makes Pac-Man temporarily invincible and a Galaxian flagship that awards the player a large sum of points. The ghosts are often seen driving vehicles, such as airplanes, buses, cars, pogo-sticks and flying saucers, and will sometimes drop miniature ghost enemies from the air to try and hit Pac-Man. Eating large flashing Power Pellets will cause the ghosts to turn blue for a short time, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.

Why Players Still Load It Up

The only feature of Pac-Land Miyamoto cites as a direct inspiration was the blue background of the game as opposed to the black ones he typically would put in his games. In a retrospective review for the TurboGrafx-16 conversion, IGN disliked the game's difficulty for lacking any real challenge, and said the game seems to have been made simply to keep Pac-Man relevant at the time instead of as a "real deal" game. Computer + Video Games called the PC Engine version a "marvelous conversion" for its vibrant visuals, stage layouts, gameplay and accuracy to the coin-op game; they had a similar response for the Atari Lynx version, claiming its accuracy to the original would entice fans of the arcade release.

He called it an "interesting game" where Pac-Man is an "animated character that moves along a horizontally scrolling landscape" while praising the "very colouful" graphics and stating it is "easy to play once you've got the hang of it." Japanese publication Famitsu praised the PC Engine version's graphics and overall challenge. Raze echoed a similar response, saying the visuals, stage layouts and soundtrack added replay value to the game. AllGame was particularly critical of the TurboGrafx-16 version, lambasting its poor graphics, bland stage layouts and lack of challenge, jokingly saying it was only recommended to collectors interested in "the most morbidly poor games in existence".

Pac-Land — Frequently Asked Questions