Yet Another PAXEast Update

OK Folks, I usually try to make sure that my blog icon does not show up twice in the page-top feed, but I could not wait to post this update. I just received some exciting news from Gary Vincent and Mike Stuir of the American Classic Arcade Musuem located at Funspot in Laconia New Hampshire. Many of you may know of ACAM and Funspot from the movie The King of Kong featuring Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell. Gary posted a couple of very special announcments on the messageboards for our local classic coin-op collectors group here in New England and I thought I would share this info with everyone here.

From Gary Vincent

The American Classic Arcade Museum is pleased to announce that on Friday, March 26th and Saturday, March 27th, we will be having the first public showing of Crazy Otto since 1981 at PAX-East. PAX-East will be taking place at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA.

Ms. Pac-Man started life as Crazy Otto, an enhancement hack of Pac-Man. Developed in Massachusetts by General Computer Corporation (GCC), the game featured a number of improvements over traditional Pac-Man gameplay including randomized ghost algorithms, multiple new mazes, new music & sound, new intermissions and bonus items that float around instead of popping up in the same place.

GCC showed their game to Midway (Namco’s American distributor for Pac-Man), attempting to bluff Midway into approving the release of the enhancement kit by telling them that GCC won their lawsuit against Atari involving a similar enhancement for Missile Command. Midway had nothing in the pipeline to follow up Pac-Man, so they suggested that GCC create a true sequel to the original Pac-Man instead of an enhancement kit. The result is Ms. Pac-Man.

Crazy Otto has been in GCC's possession since 1981. It was not released in arcades and it has not been emulated. Our exhibit of Crazy Otto is a one-time showing to the public.

From Mike Stuir - ACAM Board Member

With PAX-East just around the corner, I am proud to announce the ACAM Classic Game Developer Panel that will be taking place on Saturday, March 27th. The panel will take place in the Wyvern Theater at 7:30pm.

I have an exciting discussion planned. The panelists are former employees of General Computer Corporation in Cambridge, MA. GCC was involved in game development, and between 1981-1984, they designed products that created over $750 million in revenue for Midway and Atari. Some of those products include the Ms. Pac-Man arcade game and the hardware for the Atari 7800 console.

My panel guests are:

Steve Golson (Super Missile Attack, Crazy Otto, Ms. Pac-Man, Atari 7800)
Mike Horowitz (Crazy Otto, Ms. Pac-Man)
Jonathan Hurd (Food Fight)
Tim Hoskins (Jr. Pac-Man)
Tom Westberg (Jr. Pac-Man, Atari, other arcade)
Kevin Osborn (Atari 2600/7800 games)

We invite all PAX-East attendees to join us for a fun discussion of classic game development & history.

The American Classic Arcade Museum will be in room 310 at PAX-East. We are setting up a museum exhibit in that room that will consist of classic coin-op games & pinball machines, along with static displays of gaming history. All four of the GCC-designed arcade games (Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Food Fight & Quantum) will be on display in our museum-style retro arcade environment. We will also have two classic laserdisc games (Dragon's Lair and Us Vs. Them) hooked up to projectors so the entire room can watch the gameplay.

Mike Stulir
Board of Directors
American Classic Arcade Museum