Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

by r11t • 16 years ago

139 15 16 years ago

gameinternals.com

wahnfrieden• 16 years ago

That link is down, but you can see the full article at their homepage too: http://gameinternals.com/

elliottcarlson• 16 years ago

Both links work fine for me though the server seems pretty slow at the moment.

Deimorz2• 16 years ago

tumblr seems to be going up and down, I don't know if that's normal or if I just had bad timing posting this. If it is actually normal I might have to reconsider using it.

I also had some issues with the sheer number of incoming requests overwhelming my server that I've got the images hosted on, but I think I've got that resolved now.

moses1400• 16 years ago

awesome freaking post - i love pac man (i actually prefer ms pac man) and it was well worth the very long and detailed review.

holyjaw• 16 years ago

It's interesting to revisit Pac-Man so many years later. As a kid, it was always just a game with unpredictable behavior, incomprehensible in its abstractness. Dissecting it now and providing concrete detail to every movement feels like one of those "destroying my childhood" moments.

orangecat• 16 years ago

My reaction was the opposite. Now I know why my Pac-Men were disproportionately killed by the red and pink ghosts, and learning that their "unpredictable" behavior is the result of simple but clever algorithms makes it even more impressive.

silvertab• 16 years ago

That was so much more interesting than I anticipated! Never was a big Pac-Man fan, and I guess I always assumed that the ghosts were just aiming directly for Pac-Man! To learn that they each have their personalities and targeting mode is awesome and makes the game much more interesting!

lotusleaf19872• 16 years ago

If you're interested in this you might also check out King of Kong is also an interesting documentary on Donkey Kong and the world record holders. Also, it's one of the better documentaries I've seen.

Deimorz2• 16 years ago

It's an entertaining movie, but I don't like to see it referred to as a "documentary". They did a lot of manipulative editing and such to make things seem a lot more dramatic than they actually are.

Twin Galaxies released a number of statements about misleading/inaccurate things in the movie: http://forums.twingalaxies.com/viewforum.php?f=86

I've heard that the documentary "Chasing Ghosts" is very good, but haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

lotusleaf19872• 16 years ago

After seeing the movie/documentary it's really hard to take anything Twin Galaxies says as credible and that link is just a bunch of Billy Mitchell apologists.

igrekel• 16 years ago

Ah, how it brings back memories! I did suspect this level of sophistication.

It also remembered me of that talk about collaborative diffusion which used pacman as an sample application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiobjects

RexRollman• 16 years ago

Wonderful article. I still play Pacman occasionally thanks to Mame, even though I am much more of a Mr Do! fan (which I also play in Mame).

m-photonic2• 16 years ago

The link is down for me, but I remember reading about this on another website; the coverage is probably of similar quality between the two.

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html...

m-photonic2• 16 years ago

Heh, at the time I posted I hadn't seen that the exact same site was actually linked in the article itself. Having now read the article I have to say this is a great idea for a site and I'll be following it with some interest.

Also you should do Sonic next. ;-)

http://info.sonicretro.org/SPG:Solid_Tiles#Slopes_And_Curves

http://info.sonicretro.org/SPG:Rolling

csytan• 16 years ago

To me, this was the most interesting part of the article:

“To give the game some tension, I wanted the monsters to surround Pac Man at some stage of the game. But I felt it would be too stressful for a human being like Pac Man to be continually surrounded and hunted down. So I created the monsters’ invasions to come in waves. They’d attack and then they’d retreat. As time went by they would regroup, attack, and disperse again. It seemed more natural than having constant attack.” - Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator

Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

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