VITAMINS
VITAMINS Vitamins are the two intersecting rectangles in the center of the playfield. They only appear for a few moments and then disappear and reappear. The vitamins are worth 100 points each time PACMAN eats them.
The manual for the VCS Pac-Man reimagines the bonus object, which is drawn using playfield graphics, as a “vitamin.”
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of eating and serves an additional purpose in the game design: considerable bonus points can be earned in return for steering Pac-Man in the right direction to get the fruit. The visual fidelity of these fruits, as well as the incongruity of their appearance, introduces an element of whimsy into the game. Because the maze is identical on each level, the fruit also marks achievement; players would talk about “reaching the apple stage” or “getting to the key” (the nonfruit prize that is offered last) to note their progress and boast about their skill. To avoid storing even more sprite data in ROM and drawing an additional flickering object that would result in even worse flicker, Frye represented each of the fruit bonuses with a single, even more abstract object: an orange box made of playfield graphics with a yellow player-one missile graphic filling its inside. The object didn’t change from level to level as it did in the arcade. In the printed manual for the game, Atari tried to fictionalize this technical decision by calling the bonus object a “vitamin,” which was described as “two intersecting rectangles.” In this case, the platform constrained the fiction of the game. The image of the vitamin in the manual even looks like a stylized version of the rectangular boxes shown on-screen, as shown in figure 4.2. Bank Switching and Ms. Pac-Man
The VCS version was the first home console port of Pac-Man. Atari reportedly produced upwards of ten million cartridges in its first run. This was
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Pac-Man
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