This Week In Retro: Pac-Man Battle Royale [2010] (Patreon)

January 21, 2011: The most dangerous game...is Pac-Man

by Diamond Feit

The author, with Pac-Man (right) in 2010

For a little yellow disc that was allegedly-but-not-really based off of a pizza, Pac-Man has had a surprising amount of staying power, hasn't he? The cute li'l chomper became the face of all video games for a spell (despite having no visible eyes or nose on screen) and turned into a media/merchandise sensation for a good chunk of the 1980s. Naturally, his popularity isn't what it used to be, but I'll be damned if I don't think of him every time I take that first slice out of a pizza pie.

I suppose credit should go where credit is due: Pac-Man's publisher, Namco (now Bandai Namco) has done their darndest to keep their golden boy in the spotlight for more than four decades now. That original Pac-Man game has been ported to more platforms than any of its contemporaries, and the company has always been willing to experiment by introducing Pac-Man to different kinds of gameplay. At one point there was even a LARP project called Pac-Manhattan where NYU students ran around the city of New York chasing each other in costumes; to this day, I remain bitter that I never participated in this version.

In the 21st century, Pac-Man has largely gone back to his roots of eating dots in a maze while avoiding ghosts. This Pac-renaissance can be tied to the success of Pac-Man Championship Edition, a 2007 digital release for Xbox Live Arcade that revisited the original concept but injected the experience with all-new high-definition graphics and made use of online leaderboards to get players jazzed about competing with their friends around the world for high scores. Critics loved it, players loved it, and it was clear that the appeal of Pac-Man had never left.

In 2010, Namco released a sequel of sorts in Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which kept the same look but dialed up the serotonin with the addition of ghost chains. In DX, ghosts lay dormant inside the maze and wait for Pac-Man to approach before waking up and chasing him. The layouts are arranged to encourage players to gather a great many ghosts in pursuit—dozens, easily—before finally grabbing a power pellet and devouring the entire gang en masse. Even if you, like me, are not skilled at the Pac-arts, it is a tremendously satisfying experience to chow down on 37 ghosts in a row, I promise.

It was in the midst of this rekindled Pac-Man fever that Pac-Man Battle Royale was released in arcades ten years ago this week. Yes, I said arcades: Bandai Namco saw the hubbub around their recent digital Pac-Man games and said, "Let's bring the big man back to where it all started." The fact that few people have heard of this game 10 years later suggests their gambit failed, but whatever the whims of the free market, I am here to tell you that Pac-Man Battle Royale is a legit winner.

We are, of course, awash in "battle royale" games at the moment, as video game developers have realized there are a lot of people willing to sacrifice narrative for a chance to shoot a random stranger in the face. Pac-Man Battle Royale is a last-Pac-standing sort of game, but one on a much smaller scale than your average Fortnite: Each cabinet supports a maximum of four players. However, being designed as a multiplayer game first and foremost, the cost of entry does not increase based on the number of participants, something that flies in the face of traditional arcade pricing. One coin is enough for all players to sit down and bite it out.

Being an arcade game, Pac-Man Battle Royale can be understood at a glance: Each player controls their own Pac-Man inside a simplified maze. Rather than line every alleyway, the dots are limited to only a few clusters; as in DX, clearing a group of dots drops in more dots, eventually leading the player to the all-important power pellet. Once a player eats a power pellet, their new goal is to eat the other Pac-Men as quickly as possible—unless they, too, have found a power pellet, for whenever two equal-strength Pac-Men meet, they repel one another. Ghosts also roam the maze and pose a threat to any un-powered Pac-Man, but the goal is to defeat the other human players, not the A.I.

Rounds of Pac-Man Battle Royale move fast, so a single credit lets players have at it a few times before declaring a winner. However, there are two smaller features that make the experience a bit more genial. First, every player gets a shoutout after each round, not just the winner; successes such as eating the most dots or ghosts are also lauded, even if they do not count towards the final victory. Also, each time a champion is declared, every player who did not win can tap a button to "splat" the winner with a bit of slime on-screen. This also does not count towards any goal whatsoever, but it is just plain fun.

I remember first seeing Pac-Man Battle Royale at a Japanese arcade show back in 2010 and being immediately charmed. Despite my aversion to competitive games, the simplicity of Pac-Man and the brevity of each bout made the game a delight to mess with. The model I saw also had cup holders built into the cabinet itself, so the target audience was crystal-clear: Tipsy adults could easily spend an hour on this machine for less than the cost of a pitcher of beer.

Despite my affection for it, it would be years before I actually saw a Pac-Man Battle Royale cabinet in the wild, and I have only encountered it three times in my life at most. Perhaps it was rolled out in overseas "barcades," which I do not frequent, or perhaps the machine did not charm retailers the way it did me. I kept hoping to see a console port, since everyone on my friends list had played Pac-Man Championship Edition (which Battle Royale strongly resembles), but this never came to be. The game eventually got a port as a part of Pac-Man Museum, a 2014 compilation of miscellaneous Pac-Man titles which was panned on release and has since been delisted—nevermind the fact that it was only available for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at a time when those machines had already been relegated to last-gen status.

Short of a lucky find at Dave & Busters, is there any way to play Pac-Man Battle Royale in 2021? Not really, but the idea remains alive with last year's Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, a Google Stadia exclusive (!?) that pits up to 64 players against each other in a massively online interconnected maze. That sounds way more intimidating to me than facing off against three drunks... but then again, do 64 people even own a Stadia?

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.