I don’t remember any instructions; you just watched other people play to learn how. It cost a quarter a game, so it could get expensive if you weren’t very good.
Like most popular arcade games back then, you couldn’t really win; the object was to keep from losing for as long as possible. You just kept playing as long as you could, and if you had one of the ten highest scores when you were done, you got to enter your initials for display.
I believe you, but I honestly don’t see how it’s possible.
I mean… eat the dots. Avoid the monsters. Eat the monsters when they turn blue. They turn blue when you eat the big dots.
That’s it. How could someone not glean this from watching a game?
Mr Downtown:
I don’t remember there being instructions beyond “move the joystick in the direction you want to go”. The characters were created just for the game. But, later a cartoon was based on the characters. It was just one of those things were you stuck a quarter in and kept playing until you lost all of your lives. I don’t know how pacman worked, but some arcade games if you got enough points you got a free live, similar to getting a free ball in pinball. In fact, most video games were like pinball. People didn’t really play against each other, they just played to best their own records. And, when you saw kids sitting around the machine they were probably just hanging out and watching each other play.
Lynn Bodoni, yikes. Leave the guy alone. He had a different experience in his life than you. Is that really so shocking?
The game also had an “attract mode” which it would play when no one was playing it. It would show the names of the various ghosts, point values of the dots and fruits, as well as a demo level showing the various features of the game. With just a single joystick and no buttons, it was really not hard how to figure out how to play it.
Interestingly, PONG had instructions. “AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE” is right up there with “If it moves, shoot it.” for all-time classic gaming quotes.
Well, assuming he was in the US at the time, yes. It’s like someone saying that he’s never even seen a hamburger drivethrough restaurant. The game machines were everywhere.
Everybody was pretty much watching the attract mode at first, and then a few brave souls would put a quarter in. Remember, we’d only seen Pong before, so we were used to the idea of paddles. Joysticks were a new concept to us. But oh, once we learned about joysticks…
I’m still waiting for a good Joust link, if anyone has one. I’ve found a lot of bad Joust links on my own.
I don’t ever remember seeing arcade games in supermarkets. A lot of places (like Chicago, where I live) tax and regulate arcade games. In any case, I can’t imagine supermarkets wanting the local yewts hanging out in the vestibules all day.
Hmmm. I lived in four states from the time I was 18 until I was 25 or so, between going to college, getting married, and moving from one base to another. In each of the four states, video game consoles were a common fixture in grocery stores, convenience stores, laundromats, pizza parlors (and occasionally other very casual fast food restaurants) and of course arcades. I don’t know if they were taxed and regulated in any of the states. It wasn’t a question of the supermarkets wanting youths to hang out in the entrances, but rather of the various places taking advantage of the fact that a lot of parents would give their kids quarters to go play on the games while the parents were shopping or doing laundry. And sometimes it was the parents themselves playing a game or two before or after shopping. I usually played a couple of games when doing laundry, then I’d go read my book.
What was a culture shock was moving to Las Vegas, and finding slot machines EVERYWHERE. I know that they were taxed and regulated, but apparently they made enough money to be worth the trouble. Any business that had slots (or other gambling devices) had to also supervise the gambling area, to make sure that people under 21 didn’t go near the machines. This is fairly easy in a casino, but not so easy in a grocery store.
There is no payoff. You get the satisfaction of lasting longer and achieving a higher score than your friend. That’s it. That’s why it was the #1 money-making arcade gameof all time.
I lived in the arse end of a country at the arse end of the world, and I saw video games from 1977 onward (Pong was the first I ever saw, and that’s significant because it’s widely considered the very first video game ever). I am utterly rubbish at almost every kind of video game, computer game, console game, handheld game, and even board and card game, and still I know how to play Pac-Man.
What’s your age, out of curiosity.
He’s 55, he said earlier in the thread.
That’s really weird, since the American distributor for Pac-Man was a Chicago company, and the game was everywhere in that city, including literally on the sidewalks. And in supermarkets. Chicago was pretty much ground zero for coin-op games since the 1930s, with manufacturers like Bally, Midway, Chicago Coin/Stern, , Williams, and more, and “street locations” like pizza places, supermarkets, convenience stores, and bars were popular places to site machines.
And most locales taxed and regulated games at the time, not just Chicago. The games were considered a good way to siphon off a few more quarters from patrons who had just received change at the registers, not just to attract youths, and a popular machine like Pac-Man could earn hundreds of dollars a week from an otherwise unused part of a store. (This is why you still see gumball machines and crane games in the front of stores after the cash wrap areas.)
I think Mr. Downtown is kidding with us.
For those who want to play Joust on their PC’s, I recommend a copy of William’s Arcade Classics. This is an old game, Windows based, but really DOS underneath, I’ve had a copy of this on every computer I’ve owned since it was released in 1997… 1999?
One Christmas, I got one of these, which were being sold at Target that year. It’s still in good condition and I play the more than occasional game of Robotron: 2084 on it.
Both the Williams Arcade Classics and the Target machine above have the original programming for Joust, including the infinite pterodactyl exploit.
Not really. You could only realistically play to level 255. If you beat level 255, the counter rolled over (since they only used a byte register for the counter) to board 0. Board 0 didn’t exist and the game would glitch on you.
Learn something new every time I log in here! 
I’m a twenty-something whose only experience with the original arcade box was a few times at the shitty bowling alley on the bad side of town. I got past level… 6? Didn’t make it to the third animation! 
I remember being when I was really young, probably 7 or 8, I would spend summers in this really small community in upstate NY and all the older (mid-teen) kids played Pac Man late into the night trying to beat it. They mastered the pattern to some extent. I remember the rumor was that eventually after the fruits and various other items (which I had memorized at the time), there was 15 boards with keys and 15 with Rolls Royces and then the game “blows up” (I think people believed it literally exploded but this was my 8 year old mind hearing this). I did see them routinely get to the 2nd or 3rd key I think.
In what sense?
I don’t know the rules of mahjong or Chinese checkers or poker either. If someone made an online version, I would think it rather odd to not have anything but a START button. And who in this day and age would ever think to use the cursor arrow keys to move something around on the screen—especially after you’ve just used the mouse to click START? What if you’re on a laptop that doesn’t even have dedicated arrow keys?
In the sense that you’re jokingly claiming to be a 55 year old Chicagoan who did not take particular note of an absolutely inescapeably pervasive cultural aspect of 80’s Chicago (not to mention US) culture, and also jokingly claiming not to kind of see how the game basically works after watching it for thirty seconds.
Absolutely anyone in this day and age. The majority of games that currently exist use cursor keys or wasd.