Hello there! Today I want to elaborate on a thesis I have been working on for quite a while, and it is the one in the title of this post: Pac-Man is a horror game. At first glance, this may look a bit silly (and it definitely is) and also like an early April Fool's joke, but please, indulge me for a few paragraphs.
Aesthetics
Let's start on the most shallow level of this little journey, what the player actually sees when playing the game. Your character, Pac-Man, is being chased by four ghosts. Already, in the aesthetics, we can notice an intentional horror theming by using the ghosts as enemies, and sure, you can explain this away as just the developers wanting something fun that grabs your attention in the arcades in 1980. You would, of course, be most likely correct in your assertion, especially since stories in games back then were limited to a few lines of text on the screen before inserting coins, or one paragraph in the manual for the home release of the game, but this little argument was just me getting you in the right headspace for the next ones.
The Chase
On a deeper level, the gameplay structure is very similar to modern horror games in which you are pursued by a virtually invincible foe, just like in games like Amnesia, Outlast and Alien: Isolation, and also stuff like pursuers in the modern Resident Evil games, like the Baker family, Mr. X, Lady Dimitrescu or Nemesis. To put it bluntly, you are chased through labyrinthine environments by persistent foes in those games, trying to avoid their grasp, and in Pac-Man, we can see that exact idea with the 4 ghosts, Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, seeing you are stuck in a literal maze and all 4 of them having different routines to try an box you in while you must think on your feet and avoid their traps. To go into more detail about your pursuers, in the original game Blinky straight up chases Pac-Man, Inky will try and get to the pellet in front of himn him while also trying to maintain a specific distance from Blinky, Pinky tries to get 2 pellets in front of the player's current direction to cut him off, and Clyde is chasing him until he gets within 8 pellets's worth of distance, then he diverts towards the lower left corner of the maze. So, to summarize this point, Pac-Man fits the criterion of the chase gameplay of horror games.
Survival-Horror
Now, I can argue that Pac-Man is not just a horror game, but a survival-horror game. Stay with me, we are going deeper into the weeds with this one. A survival-horror game is, as the name implies, a subset of the horror genre that adds resource management as another concern. To further illustrate what this sub-genre is about, I will bring up Resident Evil against, since it is considered the progenitor. The game has you managing multiple resources (healing items, ammo for different guns, and ink ribbons for creating saves), while also having you decide if you should kill the enemies or try to avoid them to conserve healing items or ammo, respectively.
In Pac-Man's case, I could be cheap and argue the lives system constitutes a resource, since you have to start over if you lose all of them, but that wouldn't be as fun a point to argue, even though it would be valid. I will, instead, latch onto the power pellets in the game. Let's think for a second about their role in all this: when Pac-Man eats one, the ghosts stop chasing him and actually start running away, the reason being that now he can eat them (which is quite horrific in itself, but irrelevant to the point). So, the player has a limited resource, the power pellets (4 of them to be precise), that provide a brief moment in which the player is relatively safe and can fight back against the pursuers. The cherry on top of this is that the existence of this power-up also introduces the decision-making of survival-horror. You have to decide when to eat a power pellet to maximize its effectiveness, and you also have to decide if you want to eat ghosts or not, because if you eat one, it will respawn quite quickly and start chasing you again, and if you don't, the timer for your power will expire anyway, so your resistance only slows down their pursuit (just like the pursuers in Resident Evil, I keep circling back to this game).
Conclusion
In the end, I hope this little exercise in trying to analyze Pac-Man as a horror game was as interesting to you as it was to me, and that, although a little zany, it still is relatively sound.
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This reminds me of that meme showing Pac-Man as a man in a space suit and the ghosts are fallen space explorers.
I love the exploration of other genres you covered here, some great points.
Here is that meme if anyone is wondering.
Image Source
Edit to add - if you get a chance, check out Robowarrior by Jaleco for the NES. I love that game but it has some serious survival horror elements to it as well. Everyone calls me various colorful names for bringing it up in the same genre as Resident Evil but no one has proven me wrong yet. Lol
This meme/fan art is pretty damn cool, actually. There's just something about how old games force you to use your imagination to fill in the blanks in how they look and what their story is that is pure magic.
Also, talking about RoboWarrior: never heard of this game before, but it looks absolutely awesome with that whole bomberman mechanic, but actually having to manage your bomb supply. You could indeed argue about it being a survival-horror game looking at that little twist and the overall aesthetics, just like I did with Pac-Man over here.
I think that forcing the use of imagination is why so many of us that played back then have such strong connections with games like Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, etc. It is something that modern gaming can't duplucate simply due to the technology being so much better. I used to spend hours on DeviantArt and other websites looking at interpretations of games, mostly the Atari 2600 era stuff. Some amazing work out there.
Robowarrior was part of the Bomberman franchise in Japan. Jaleco secured the rights to the game in North America, but not the Bomberman license. My mom picked it up for me by accident for a birthday. I wanted Atyanax, also by Jaleco but she got confused and forgot part of my description of the box art and grabbed Robowarrior instead. At first I was disappointed but tried to hide it, then I played it and was hooked.
To me, Robowarrior seemed like the Bomberman developers were going the opposite direction of Super Mario. They started with the party game then tried the action/adventure later.
It has a twist that screenshots don't convey. You are a robot/cyborg and you must constantly replenish your battery/life. It slowly ticks down as you play. There is so much in Robowarrior that screams survival horror but few give it a chance no matter how you sell it to them.
Ultimately, their loss as it is a good game.
Every boss is multiple sprites big, something the head of Treasure (makers of Gunstar Heroes and more) said was impossible on the Super Nintendo, let alone the 8-Bit NES. Overall, an amazing accomplishment.
Damn, the hostory of this game is fascinating by itself, with the rights management and all that.
Also, it's awesome that the mistaken purchase led to what could be called one of your core games and a nice anecdote you can share with people. I love that for you!
Relating to tech being used to drain the imagination out of games, I feel like it runs even deeper because not only can we put more detail into games as a baseline, but it seems a lot of new games, most of the AAA stuff and some indies, tend to stick to more safe aesthetics, like realism or that one particular type of chunky pixel art.
Robowarrior got more playtime from me since release than all of the Mario games combined. I know I am an outlier with that as Mario is obviously so much bigger but for me, I got Robowarrior at that right time, that small window in our gaming lives where it would be impossible for others to feel the same about it.
Like people that defend the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man as not being a bad game, or E.T., those gamers got those games at that small point in life that they are definitely core memories for them.
Things like that is why I do my best to not think negatively of the choices of games others value. For them, it is a deep connection that I simply don't share.
Modern games also lose out on platform differences. The hardware is so close anymore that you almost have to pause the game and whip out a magnifying glass and compare side by side to find any differences. Others require third party software to tell you the differences that are simply not visible to the average person. I cannot tell a difference between 45 to 60 FPS and a solid 60 FPS but so many complain the game is ruined over a slight slow down. Or the people complaining about better anti aliasing on this game on this platform absolutely destroying the same game on a competitor console.
Just play the damn games. It is not hard.
During the 16-Bit days, it was not too hard to pick out a Super Nintendo port of a game over the Genesis and vice versa depending on what mattered to you. That mattered little to most of us as we could not afford both SNES and Genesis AND games for them. We had a genuine interest in how a cross platform port looked because odds are, it was going to be different somehow.
The differences today are almost null.
There is a charm that has been lost. Those little changes developers had to make to accommodate the limitations of the hardware are lost today as there are no real differences between the consoles, at least Xbox and PlayStation.
A gamers imagination will always trump what a computer can display. Sadly, as those computers can display more, gamers need to use their imagination less and less.
oh that meme is absolutely epic dude! Someone is really creative in making that.
It defiinitely epic. I think of that one whenever I play Pac-Man, or even think of Pac-Man.
Makes me think about how wide open remakes could be if there was more thought put into them. I mean, could you imagine Pac-Man as a modern survival horror game? It would be wild.
I don't think whoever owns the rights to it would allow it but if they could make a game like the artwork exhibits that would be absolutely awesome. Do you know the name of the artist? I would like to see more of their stuff.
Now this is a game i do not want to try, to avoid seeing ghost in my dreams, too bad for my puppy heart. but the pacman looks cute in way though except the ghost part
haha, you are absolutely correct and I like the correlation of survival horror and being pursued. Someone should run with this concept in some sort of evil adaptation of the game. It could be really fun.