Pac-Man was a game you could beat. You could beat it by memorizing patterns. The ghosts, you see, weren’t programmed for randomness. If you zigged and they zagged, they’d do the exact same thing in a similar situation. It wasn’t long before everybody knew the patterns to beat Pac-Man.
Ms. Pac-Man is a different story. The ghosts are programmed for randomness, so there isn’t a pattern that exists to beat it–the ghosts behave differently in each game. But there is one technique that will earn a player an incredible amount of points “Grouping.” If you can induce the ghosts to move close to one another, you can stay alive and get 1,600 points when you gobble them near a power pill. This is the story of three guys from Montana who got together and figured out how to give Ms. Pac-Man a beating she’ll never forget.
If Tom Asaki was hot in the summer of ‘82, it was due to the temperature, not to his skill at Ms. Pac-Man. He was pretty good then, but he wasn’t grouping the ghosts yet. At least that’s what Don Williams says, and Don should know, since he regularly watched Tom play down at Games Are Fun in Bozeman, Montana. Superior players usually can’t put their techniques into words. One way to get good is to watch a guy’s moves. Don got pretty good at Ms. Pac-Man too.
But Tom Asaki and Don Williams didn’t really get tight until Spencer Ouren, another Bozeman boy, started sharing his Ms. Pac-Man techniques. Spencer knew Tom and introduced Don to Tom. From then on, whenever one of them picked up a trick, he would share it with the other two. In January of 1983, they were not playing the game as individuals–beating Ms. Pac-Man had become a group project. Their goal was to score the first- second- and third-highest total scores ever recorded at the game. They felt that if they put their heads together, they could come up with the best system to totally ace out the rest of the world.
Grouping is not a mystery. It’s a standard technique among better Ms. Pac-Man players. The basic move is accomplished from the “hold” position on the board. This is a spot that the ghosts will never cross to destroy you. The hold is located in a different location on each of the four maze patterns of the game. By moving out of this safe spot in varying directions, you can influence the separate moving ghosts to get closer to one another in pursuit of the faked direction you appear to be taking. Then you can pop back into the hold and the ghosts will be grouped in a tighter, more manageable pattern.
Grouping is pretty easy on the first three maze patterns (waves one through nine). But even the best players always seemed to get wiped out on the fourth maze pattern, called the “Junior” boards. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be a hold on the Junior boards. The other three holds didn’t work, and the Bozeman Think Tank, they called themselves, were continually killed by the blue-green ghost. Without a hold on the fourth maze, it would be impossible to conquer the game, because after the tenth wave half the waves are Junior boards.
When they had just about given up, a fellow by the name of Matt Brass met up with the Think Tank. Brass, a pretty decent player himself, had just returned from the North American Video Olympics in Ottumwa, Iowa. When Brass described the Olympics scene to Tom, Spencer and Don, he dropped a bombshell–some players were grouping the ghosts on the Junior boards.
It wasn’t true. Brass wasn’t lying–he had meant to say that some players were grouping before the Junior boards.
But the Think Tank panicked. They thought they were pretty good at Ms. Pac-Man. Now someone, some mysterious someone, had whipped the Junior boards, which had seemed impossible.
Believing that the impossible was now possible (and had been achieved), the Think Tank pressed on with their own solution. They thought, “Well, if it’s possible, we want to be able to do it too.” It was like being told that Mt. Everest had been scaled when it hadn’t. The miscommunication from Brass made the Think Tank believe grouping was possible on the Junior boards. In fact, no one had ever done it.
They worked five days straight on the problem. The first thing they did was to use the “rack advance” inside the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet to advance the game to the higher boards. The found that if they just played the game normally, by the time they worked their way to the higher boards, they became reluctant to take any chances for fear of ruining a good score. And you don’t make any breakthroughs if you’re not willing to take chances.
With a lot of research, the Think Tank, and especially Spencer, decided that the key to grouping had to involve the four tunnels on the sides of the screens. They started playing around in there, luring the ghosts on wild goose chases to see how they would respond. One ghost–Sue–seemed particularly attracted to Ms. Pac-Man in the tunnels. Spencer discovered that if the pink ghost is coming straight at you, you can deceive him by pointing Ms. Pac-Man’s eyes upward. The pink ghost, they found, has been programmed to go in the same direction as you and to get in front of you, even if there is no channel to move. This information can be used for avoidance and grouping. With these and other techniques, Spencer was soon using the tunnels and grouping three of the ghosts. The other members of the Think Tank added refinements.
It was Tom who made the breakthrough. By using Spencer’s method to group three ghosts, he discovered a hold! The hold, which didn’t seem to exist on the Junior boards, was there–but only if you grouped three of the ghosts before you went into it. With this knowledge, it became a simple matter of using the tunnels to group the three ghosts on the run, go into the hold [see diagram] to wait for Sue, and then nail all of them. The Think Tank was soon achieving scores in the 400,000 range, which had been considered impossible.
You can imagine how Tom, Don and Spencer felt when they spoke with Matt Brass again and discovered the communication breakdown. The Bozeman Think Tank had done the impossible–only because they mistakenly believed it had already been achieved. Sometimes psychology can be just as important for good scores as eye/hand coordination.
{ Paul Stokstad, Computer Games, June 1984 }
