The Pac Man Passes The Torch
52 year-old Pac Man designer Toru Iwatani is retiring from the racket, but he’s going out with a bang. The game designer has created the Pac Man Championship Edition for the final round of the Xbox 360 Pac-Man World Championship in New York City. It will be available tomorrow as a $10.00 download on Microsoft”s Xbox Live online service.
According to Reuters, this version is a faithful interpretation of the 27-year-old original game. Iwatani created Pac Man Championship Edition as a two-dimensional game, like the original. "I wanted to stay with the original simple rules of Pac Man," he said. There are no plans for another version of Pac Man, but Iwatani might work with rights holder Namco Bandai Holdings in a supervisory position or work on a new version with his students at Tokyo Polytechnic University.
Just because it remains 2-D, Pac Man Championship Edition isn’t exactly stuck in the dark ages. It has challenging and innovative levels, including a dark mode where much of the maze is hidden and players are guided only by a flashlight lighting Pac Man’s path.