{"id":1226,"date":"2017-02-03T11:39:31","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T16:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=1226"},"modified":"2017-02-03T12:09:19","modified_gmt":"2017-02-03T17:09:19","slug":"ms-pac-man-turns-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/1226\/ms-pac-man-turns-35","title":{"rendered":"Ms. Pac-Man Turns 35"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ms.<\/a><\/p>\n

35 years ago today, Ms. Pac-Man made its worldwide public debut during a press conference held by Namco at Castle Park Entertainment Center in Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ms. Pac-Man launched on February 3, 1982.<\/p>\n

In 2011, I interviewed three of Ms. Pac-Man’s creators in depth for a planned feature I was going to write about the game’s 30th anniversary. That project fell through, and although many journalists have written about Ms. Pac-Man since then (and its creators began giving public talks years ago), I found that my old interviews still contained fascinating nuggets of information on the game that had not yet come to light.<\/p>\n

So I turned all of my source material on Ms. Pac-Man into an oral history, which FastCompany.com just published<\/a>. It’s likely that just about everything you’d ever want to know about Ms. Pac-Man’s creation is covered there.<\/p>\n

On VC&G<\/em>, I would like to talk specifically about how I discovered the release date for Ms. Pac-Man, since I’d like people to correct the information that’s out there. (Prior to the publication of my article, sites stated the launch date of Ms. Pac-Man anywhere between late 1981 and January 1982. Wikipedia still says “January 13, 1982” as the launch date — I’ve asked Ms. Pac-Man’s creators, and none of us can figure out where it came from.)<\/p>\n

While I found evidence in a single newspaper arcade advertisement that Ms. Pac-Man was anticipated as early as January 31, 1982 (possibly from a test location), Bally Midway formally announced Ms. Pac-Man to the world during a press conference on Wednesday, February 3rd, 1982. A key newspaper report confirms this:<\/p>\n

\"Newspaper<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s an article from the Los Angeles Times dated Thursday, February 4th, 1982. It mentions the press conference happening on Wednesday of that week — hence, Feb 3, 1982.<\/p>\n

Here’s another article Ms. Pac-Man announcement article newspapers reprinted verbatim widely across the US. It is based on the article above and sent out as a wire report for syndication:<\/p>\n

\"Newspaper<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyway — what a game, what a story. I hope you enjoy reading about<\/a> how a band of plucky New England upstarts created the most popular arcade game in U.S. history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

35 years ago today, Ms. Pac-Man made its worldwide public debut during a press conference held by Namco at Castle Park Entertainment Center in Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ms. Pac-Man launched on February 3, 1982. In 2011, I interviewed three of Ms. Pac-Man’s creators in depth for a planned feature I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,21,9],"tags":[83,869,979,88,1199,1445,891,1446],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-game-info-and-history","category-news-current-events","category-retrogaming","tag-anniversaries","tag-arcade","tag-fastcompany","tag-freelance-work","tag-ms-pac-man","tag-newspapers","tag-pac-man","tag-sources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}