Thursday, December 17, 2009

Ms. Pac-Man used to be a guy ...

... and an ugly one at that.

According to GameInformer.com, the game we now know (and love) as Ms. Pac-Man began life as Crazy Otto.

Basically, Crazy Otto was a hack of the original Pac-Man--and was created by MIT students Kevin Curran and Doug Macrae.

Otto looked a bit like Pac-Man, but with legs. And he didn't chase Blinky, Pinky, Inky or Clyde--he chased monsters named Darwin, Freud, Newton and Plato.



Anyway, the story goes that Midway, Pac-Man’s North American distributor, somehow found out about the "expansion," bought it from Curran and Macrae and transformed it into Ms. Pac-Man.

Does this mean we can consider Ms. Pac-Man the first transgender character in video games?

(BTW, a  few videos of the Crazy Otto prototype in action can be viewed here.)

1 comment:

Viewtiful_Justin said...

I just read about how Ms. Pac Man was not originally intended to be a Pac Man game. Glad it morphed into what we know and love.

I did not, however, know that she used to be a man.