by Danreb VictorioAt 45 years, it’s definitely a milestone year for PAC-MAN. Hot off the heels of an interesting release in Shadow Labyrinth, Atari continued the celebration at San Diego Comic-Con. In addition to the PAC-MAN Cafe adjacent to Petco Park, Atari also took the SDCC floor to unveil the Atari x PAC-MAN Collection among all sorts of other retro goodies.
To celebrate the five years leading up to its golden anniversary, Atari has come up with a collection that should make both retro gamers and collectors wide-eyed.
The aforementioned Atari x PAC-MAN Collection includes a yellow, PAC-MAN-themed Atari 2600+ and the High Score Collection 7800 featuring Galaga, Dig Dug, Xevious, and the all-new PAC-MAN: Double Feature complete in Atari cartridge form. The set also includes five collectible wireless Atari 2600+ Joysticks themed in the colors of PAC-MAN, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
Each of these items was available to try out at the booth, in addition to an exclusive Golden Box Edition of PAC-MAN Double Feature that was only available to buy at San Diego Comic-Con for $100. Only 1000 of them were produced.
Everything at the booth was really impressive to see and try in person, but if I’m being brutally honest — I wasn’t really a fan of what I played using the new wireless joysticks. It wasn’t the fault of the joysticks, as they’re made to replicate the exact way they were in the ’80’s. That said, controlling PAC-MAN and the diggers in Dig Dug was easier said than done. Most of my “success” was had in Galaga. But alas, I wasn’t here to play old games, I was here to talk about this new product line, which is available for pre-order now.
All this said, be sure to catch my interview above with Matt Burnett, VP of Strategic Operations at Atari, to talk about the new anniversary set.
I’ll leave you all with my favorite snippet from the talk.
“Our legacy and community is incredibly important to us. All things that we think about, as far as designing and bringing to the market, are backwards compatible for a reason. We never wanna leave that legacy and community behind, and so all of our cartridges and controllers will work on original Atari hardware. If you wanna take some of our wireless joysticks and play them on your original Atari hardware, you can do that as well. We love that compatibility with all original stuff. We want our legacy and community to be happy no matter what piece of hardware they’re using.”