Sonic Creator Celebrating Pac-Man's 30th With New Game

John Funk

U.N. Owen Was Him?
Dec 20, 2005
20,364
0
0
Sonic Creator Celebrating Pac-Man's 30th With New Game



Pac-Man will be turning 30 in 2010, and Sonic the Hedgehog co-creator Hirokazu Yasuhara will be working on a brand new Pac-Man game to wish him a happy birthday.

Speaking with Gamasutra [http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22586], Namco Bandai Games America boss Makoto Iwai said that the company was looking to do something for the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man in order to show the ravenous yellow spheroid some gratitude. "As a group, we feel like we should do something to make him come back. So, there's one project that we started working on, and [Yasuhara is] part of it," said Iwai.

Yasuhara, NBGA's senior design director, has a fairly extensive resume - after being one of the co-creators and level designers for the original Sonic the Hedgehog, Yasuhara eventually made his way to Naughty Dog, where he worked on the Jak and Uncharted games.

Yasuhara mentioned Pac-Man in a 2008 interview also with Gamasutra [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3769/game_design_psychology_the_full_.php?page=2], where he said that he had a strong desire to do a "character game" like Jak & Daxter, feeling that the market was saturated with first-person titles. Interestingly enough, Iwai told Gamasutra that the new Pac-Man project was "ort of meeting his wish 100 percent, in a sense."

A character action game, starring Pac-Man? Does ... controlling him around a maze eating dots count as character action? Or will it be something completely different from Yasuhara, perhaps something along the lines of an action platformer?

Pac-Man is reportedly going to be spending his 30th birthday at home with his wife and children. Whether or not the ghosts are invited is anyone's guess.

(Via Joystiq [http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/06/new-pac-man-game-on-the-way-to-celebrate-30th-pac-manniversary/])

Permalink
 

Cousin_IT

New member
Feb 6, 2008
1,822
0
0
expecting either the were-pacman who doesnt need to eat the big pills to catch the ghosts. Or a dark/light world motif wherein you switch from being pacman to being a ghost...or maybe the ghosts get replaced by a frustrated mrs pacman chasing mr for being out all night popping pills with stoned ectoplasmic specters
 

Daye.04

Proud Escaperino
Feb 9, 2009
1,957
0
0
Uhm .. Okay. Bringing pac-man back to life is kinda even worse than keeping Sonic alive. Why og why would they try to make a new pac-man game? Leave it. Leave it when people still think of pac-man as a good game. Please for the love of all that is holy, leave it!
 

Meado

New member
Apr 27, 2008
812
0
0
Have they released Pac-Man on XBox Live Arcade yet? I would have thought that would be the first step.
 

Antiparticle

New member
Dec 8, 2008
835
0
0
Meado said:
Have they released Pac-Man on XBox Live Arcade yet? I would have thought that would be the first step.
Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man C.E. (Championship Edition) are all available on XBLA. I would recommend that last one in particular, it's an updated version of Pac-Man, developed by the original Pac-Man creator. Here the goal is to score as many points as possible in a time limit. In this version eating fruit makes dots reappear so you can keep playing in one level without breaks. This makes for very tense and fast gameplay. It features new levels, different AI behavior for Pinky, detailed statistics after a game, and it looks very pretty too.