A historical tribute and accurate remake of the original Pac-Man arcade game

Inspired by The Pac-Man Dossier

• Sound
• Cutscenes
• 2 Player switch-off

Contact me at [email protected]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

You can play the game on all canvas-enabled browsers. Touch controls are enabled for mobile browsers. The game is resolution-independent and smoothly scales to fit the size of any screen. Performance may increase by shrinking the window or zooming in with your browser.

• swipe: steer pacman on mobile browsers
• arrows: steer pacman
• end: pause the game
• escape: open in-game menu

• Safari
• Firefox
• Chrome

• iPad and iPhone (Mobile Safari)
• Samsung Galaxy Tablet 7 (Firefox Beta)
• Nexus 7 (Chrome)

Each of the following games are playable from the main menu.

• Pac-Man: 1980 original arcade by Namco.
• Ms. Pac-Man: 1981 Pac-Man modification by GCC/Midway.
• Crazy Otto: GCC's unreleased, in-house version of Ms. Pac-Man before it was sold to Midway. (See video)
• Cookie-Man: a brand new version of Ms. Pac-Man with a sophisticated procedural map generator.

Each game has an alternate mode called Turbo (a.k.a. speedy mode). This is a popular hardware modification of the game found in many of the original arcade cabinets. In this mode, Pac-Man travels about twice as fast (same speed as the disembodied eyes of the ghosts) and is not slowed down when eating pellets.

High scores for each game (normal and turbo separately) are stored on your local machine by your browser.

Learn Mode allows you to visualize the behaviors of the ghosts. (The colored square represents the ghost bait.)

This mode allows you to practice the game with special features. You can go into slow-motion or rewind time with the special onscreen buttons or the hotkeys listed below. (The time-manipulation controls and design were borrowed from the game Braid). You can also turn on invincibility or ghost visualizers from the menu.

• shift: hold down to rewind (a la Braid)
• 1: hold down to slow down the game to 0.5x
• 2: hold down to slow down the game to 0.25x
• o: toggle pacman turbo mode
• p: toggle pacman attract mode (autoplay)
• i: toggle pacman invincibility
• n: go to next level
• q,w,e,r,t: toggle target graphic for blinky, pinky, inky, clyde, and pacman, respectively.
• a,s,d,f,g: toggle path graphic for blinky, pinky, inky, clyde, and pacman, respectively.

In the Cookie-Man game mode, the mazes change as often as they do in Ms. Pac-Man, but are procedurally generated. Each level has a pre-defined color palette, granting an element of consistency to the random structure of the mazes.

The mazes are built carefully to closely match design patterns deduced from the original maps found in Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.

It is a goal of this project to stay reasonably accurate to the original arcade game. The current accuracy is due to the work of reverse-engineers Jamey Pittman and Bart Grantham.

Currently, the coordinate space, movement physics, ghost behavior, actor speeds, timers, and update rate match that of the original arcade game.

The timings of certain non-critical events such as score display pauses and map-blinking animations are currently approximated.

Unfortunately, you cannot use patterns from the original Pac-Man because of complications with random number generators.

Also, the collision detection is tighter than the original (checked twice as often) to prevent pass-through "bugs".

I also chose to leave out the overflow bug which shifts a ghost target when Pac-Man is facing up, detailed here.

Feel free to report any inaccuracies that may detract or simply annoy. Any reverse-engineers willing to contribute their expertise to this project would be a big help as well!

• all javascript source files are located in the "src/" directory
• "build.sh" file concatenates all the source files into "pacman.js" in the top directory
• "debug.htm" displays the game by using the "src/*.js" files
• "index.htm" displays the game by using the "pacman.js" file only
• the "fruit" directory contains notes and diagrams on Ms. Pac-Man fruit paths
• the "mapgen" directory contains notes, diagrams, and experiments on procedural Pac-Man maze generation
• the "sprites" directory contains references sprite sheets and an atlas viewer "atlas.htm" for viewing the scalable game sprites.
• the "font" directory contains font resources used in the game.

Thanks to Jamey Pittman for compiling The Pac-Man Dossier from his own research and those of other reverse-engineers, notably 'Dav' and 'JamieVegas' from this Atari Age forum thread. Further thanks to Jamey Pittman for replying to my arcade implementation-specific questions with some very elaborate details to meet the accuracy requirements of this project.

Thanks to Bart Grantham for sharing his expert knowledge on Ms. Pac-Man's internals, providing me with an annotated disassembly and notes on how fruit paths work in meticulous detail.

Thanks to the original Pac-Man team at Namco for creating such an enduring game. And thanks to the MAME team for their arcade emulator and very helpful debugger.

Thanks to the Ms. Pac-Man team at GCC for improving Pac-Man with a variety of aesthetic maps that I based the map generator on.

Thanks to Jonathan Blow for creating the rewind mechanic in Braid which inspired the same mechanic in my project. Further thanks for presenting the implementation details in this talk which helped in my own implementation.

Thanks to Tang Yongfa and their cookie monster Pac-Man design at threadless website which I used as the character in the random maze mode.

• http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z0tuv/historical_tribute_and_accurate_remake_of_the/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/z7bc0/very_polished_javascript_remake_of_pac_man/
• http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/z85lj/quite_accurate_remake_of_pacman_in_js/
• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448539
• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464006
• http://www.lockergnome.com/news/2012/09/02/play-pac-man-online-for-free-no-download/
• http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/202594-html5-pac-man/
• http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=664081
• http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=4563.0
• http://news.dice.com/2012/09/04/pac-man-online-open-source/