We’d had our Atari 2600 for about a month at the time. The rubbery joysticks had been gently broken in and the Atari paddles… Well, it had been a month so they were probably broken.

We’d grown accustomed to the styling (which looked retro even in 1980) and on the whole we were happy with the console and the games that it came with.

Atari’s lead designer could see the future. Sadly he could only see as
far as the 1991 Nissan Micra dash.

Before the Atari, the only video game I'd played was Grandstand™ Pong. Scoring in that game had been rather a simple matter:

• I controlled the bat on the left

• My cousin the bat on the right.

• The first person to score 10 points won

• If the technical winner wasn't me, I would still ‘win’ by hitting reset and pretending that the game had never taken place.

My cousin sometimes struggled with these extended rules and cried a bit after the reset, but that was to be expected, I felt, since she was a girl.

Now, though, Pong was out, Atari was in and the old rules had to go. The console had shipped with two multiplayer games for me to play with my cousin, but it also came with Pacman: The first single player game I’d ever seen.

One player? How can I cheat at that?!

The very idea of a single player game seemed completely alien to me, but my parents seemed happy enough to play it.

“Mum, why would you play a game on your own?”

"Well, the idea is to get a high score", she explained.

“Why?”

“So that you know you’re good at the game”

Children often ask questions to which there are no easy answers. They ask “Where was I before I was born?”, and “What happens when we die?” - I suppose that compared to those, my question was relatively easy to answer. All it would take would be patience and skill bordering on the obsessive/compulsive, and a few hours free on a Saturday afternoon.

I asked, "What's the biggest score you can get?"

Migraines increased by 60% between 1980 and 1989.
I mention that for no reason, Atari lawyers.

So with a Saturday free, that’s exactly what my parents set out to discover: The maximum score on Atari 2600 Pacman.

• You score a point for every video wafer that PAC-MAN eats.

• You also score points when PAC-MAN eats power pills, vitamins, and ghosts.

• Every time PAC-MAN eats all of the video wafers on the maze, he earns an extra life and a new maze full of video wafers.

After a couple of false starts, my Dad started the game and set to work chomping at those video wafers. 20 minutes in, it became clear that even for a talented player, this was no job for one man. The orange-on-blue maze and flickery sprites were likely to cause lasting retinal damage and the sound likely to cause tinnitus, so my parents soon turned Pacman into a tag-team event, and played the game in shifts.

I don’t remember exactly how long the game went on for, but I do remember very clearly what happened when they eventually reached the highest score in the world:

The score wrapped around to zero. I knew these single player games were pointless!

September, 2005

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