I recently had the opportunity to play Pac-Man World: Re-Pac, a mostly competent remake of what wasn’t a particularly remarkable 3D platformer to begin with. This isn’t going to be a review, because I don’t really have a lot to say on the matter that you couldn’t surmise from a cursory glance at the game. It does, however, make me think about the challenges of expanding upon very old-school video games.

The early 1980s gave us a lot of video games, but three juggernauts stand above the rest in their legacies. They left indelible marks on the industry and their successors are still around today. Those three kings I refer to are Mario, Tetris, and Pac-Man. One could probably make the argument that there were others deserving of at least equivalent status, but nobody can dispute the importance of these games, and they do nicely to make my point.

Mario: The People’s Champ

Mario technically had his debut in Donkey Kong, then was given his own name in Mario Bros., before finally starring in Super Mario Bros., the game that defined the character for generations to come. Super Mario Bros. is a game of relatively low abstraction. It’s made of characters that have some recognizable motives. It’s hardly Shakespeare, but one can easily identify Mario, Bowser, and Princess Peach and explain what they’re doing relative to the game’s design. Bowser kidnaps the Princess, presumably to seize some sort of control over the Mushroom Kingdom. Peach is the archetypal damsel in distress, which is to say she doesn’t do much. Mario, the working class hero, steps up to save the day.

These roles, particularly Mario’s part as the hero, are all represented in-game in ways that make sense. Mario traverses obstacles, primarily by jumping over them. He fights enemies, primarily by jumping on them. Bowser has an army of minions, and he himself can breathe fire and throw hammers. Peach is merely rescued at the end of the game, but at least she appears in the capacity one would expect from her part. Because these roles are both well-defined and well-represented, it’s quite easy to iterate on this formula. There have been a lot of Mario games. Even ignoring the numerous spin-offs based on sports, auto racing, board games, and others, there’s a bevy of platformers 2D and 3D alike that share their fundamentals with this game from 1983. These sequels improve upon the representation of the characters and expand upon the core gameplay idea (new ways to jump, new power-ups, new enemies, etc.). The transition to the third dimension represented a major structural change, yet the core was very much recognizable: Mario jumps over obstacles and on enemies to save the Princess. Perhaps Mario himself is an unlikely hero compared to his contemporaries, but Super Mario Bros. was clearly a winning formula.

Tetris: Steady as She Goes

Much has been said about Alexey Pajitnov’s virtually accidental creation of a cultural phenomenon and his struggles to export it beyond the Iron Curtain. They even made a movie about it. It’s easy to see why a film about Tetris is about the making of Tetris rather than an adaptation of what happens in Tetris, because Tetris is a highly abstract game. There are no characters, nor any setting aside from some releases of the game featuring Saint Basil's Cathedral on the title screen. What the game is about is what the game is: blocks falling into a well. Where do they come from? Why do they fall? Where do they go when lines are cleared? Totally unnecessary questions. The pieces are nothing more than parts of the game.

As a consequence of this abstraction, there isn’t any way to represent the core concept of Tetris any more accurately or faithfully than the original. That’s not to say Tetris has remained unchanged for more than 40 years. Even aside from a handful of attempts at new formulae in games like Hatris and Welltris, there have been a lot of Tetris games that make subtle changes to the Tetris experience with mechanics like gravity, lock delay, and rotation all being ever so slightly different between releases. Presentation also varies; consider the distinction between the psychedelic imagery of Tetris Effect compared to the cute anime characters of Puyo Puyo Tetris. But in the same way nobody needs a sequel to Chess with an expanded board, new pieces, and advanced rules, nobody needs Tetris to be anything other than what it is.

Pac-Man: Ghosts to the Left of Me, Cherries to the Right

And thus, we return to Pac-Man. An instant hit, it spawned plenty of imitators in the burgeoning maze chase game genre. Much like Super Mario Bros., it stars an iconic character. Much like Tetris, it’s built on an irresistible formula. And unlike either of them, it seems to struggle with its identity in the present day.

Pac-Man occupies an awkward middle ground in terms of abstraction. Certainly there are identifiable characters, those being Pac-Man and the various ghosts. Their representations in-game are crude, nowhere near as detailed nor as lovable as how they appear on the game’s marquee, yet they are easily recognizable regardless. But can you explain what’s actually happening in Pac-Man? Not the game mechanics; those are simple enough. Not even necessarily a plot, because Pac-Man certainly doesn’t need one. Just on the elemental level of where these characters are and what they’re doing there. Pac-Man is in a maze, where he eats pellets and sometimes fruit. The Ghosts chase after him, as ghosts are wont to do in various works of literature. Pac-Man can eat large pellets that allow him to eat the ghosts. The most identifiable characteristic of Pac-Man seems to be that he’s hungry. The ghosts see him as their enemy. The maze is presumably their home. Perhaps it’s meant to be a forest, considering the variety of fruit that can be found there, but the neon blue walls don’t convey that particularly well. Frankly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And as a game, it doesn’t need to. As the foundation of a series, it’s a bit hard to work with.

The Pac-Man series therefore finds itself at a crossroads. It could take the path of Tetris and simply refine the core gameplay formula without concern for what Pac-Man is about. They’ve done that many times, and the continue to this day, with games like Pac-Man Championship Edition DX 2 and Pac-Man 99 sprucing up the gameplay and the presentation while being faithful to its retro roots. The other path is the path of Mario, evolving and expanding. This is a challenge there aren’t a lot of ideas to evolve. They’ve certainly tried, going back as far as 1984’s Pac-Land, the first platformer in the series. Pac-Man World is another such example. Perhaps the biggest problem with Pac-Man World, however, is how detached it feels from the series’ roots. Despite some attempts to pay homage to the classic maze chase experience, it often ends up feeling like a generic 3D platformer that happens to feature Pac-Man rather than a natural continuation of the original game. Pac-Man was hardly the only series to go through this process; Bomberman Hero was released a year prior and is similarly a reduction of the action-puzzle gameplay Bomberman was known for.

At the end of one path, Pac-Man stays true to his roots but never gets to be more than a mascot for a series. At the end of the other path, Pac-Man can be a hero, but only by leaving his past behind him. What do we value more? Pac-Man the game, or Pac-Man the character? Which one does Bandai Namco value more?