Ms. Pac-Man and the Enhancement Kit

Abstract

In 1981 two MIT undergraduates, Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran, who ran a business placing arcade machines in student dormitories, disassembled Atari’s Missile Command and sold a circuit board that made it harder and faster. Atari sued them for $15 million and, a few months later, paid them $1.2 million to stop selling such kits. Before the deal took effect, their company, General Computer Corporation (GCC), had finished a second kit for Namco’s Pac-Man, called Crazy Otto. Midway, Pac-Man’s American licensee, bought it rather than fight it, and on 3 February 1982 released it as Ms. Pac-Man, which sold about 125,000 cabinets and was the highest-grossing arcade game of 1982 on the American industry charts. The enhancement-kit trade, the courts’ first answers to whether a modified game is a copy, and the “kill screens” at which early arcade games broke down all came out of the same few years when arcade code was small enough for students to read.

The Dormitory Route

Macrae, a sophomore, put his brother’s pinball machine in MIT’s MacGregor House in 1978. With Curran he grew it into a route of 25 pinball and video machines around campus, splitting the takings with the dormitories. When Atari’s Missile Command arrived in 1980, the machine they installed earned $650 in its first week and $400 in the second. The drop was the problem they set out to solve: once players had learned a game, they stopped feeding it.

In January 1981 the partners borrowed $25,000 from Macrae’s mother and bought a GenRad emulator for the 6502 processor that ran Missile Command. Over spring break, with Chris Rode, another student, they worked out the game’s code and wrote a new version with new enemy types, faster play and new sound effects. They sold it as Super Missile Attack, a circuit board that plugged into the ROM sockets of an existing cabinet, encrypted so that others could not copy it. An arcade operator could make an old machine new again for a fraction of the price of a new cabinet. By mid-May 1981 they had incorporated GCC, sold about 1,000 kits and taken in almost $300,000. Steve Golson, another MIT student, joined them.

Atari’s Lawsuit

When GCC’s advertisements appeared in the trade magazines, Atari obtained a temporary restraining order. GCC had already asked a court for a declaration that its kit did not infringe Atari’s copyright; Atari countersued for $15 million. A judge allowed GCC to sell a revised version while the case continued. In October 1981 Atari proposed ending the fight. GCC signed a two-year “development” contract worth $1.2 million that did not oblige it to develop anything, in return for giving up enhancement kits made without the original manufacturer’s permission and giving Atari the first refusal on new games it created. Macrae later said the case was dropped “with prejudice,” which he took as an admission that Atari should not have sued. GCC went on to make dozens of games for Atari’s home consoles and designed the custom chip of the Atari 7800.

The legal question GCC’s case left open was answered in another kit case. Artic International sold a chip that sped up Midway’s Galaxian and boards that reproduced Pac-Man as “Puckman.” Artic argued that a game whose images changed with every play was not “fixed” and so not copyrightable, and that speeding up a game was no more a new work than playing a record at a higher speed. The Seventh Circuit rejected both arguments in Midway Manufacturing Co. v. Artic International in 1983. The audiovisual display was the protected work, and a speeded-up game was a derivative work, since, unlike a speeded-up record, people would pay for it. Unlicensed enhancement kits became infringement.

Crazy Otto

GCC had seen the deal with Atari coming and used the time. Over the summer of 1981 it wrote an enhancement kit for Pac-Man, Namco’s 1980 game, which Midway manufactured and sold in North America (see Toru Iwatani and Pac-Man). By early October Crazy Otto was complete: four new mazes, ghosts that were harder to predict, fruit that moved around the board, new music and animations, and a hero with legs, so that he would not be mistaken for Namco’s character.

Because the kit predated the Atari contract, it did not fall under Atari’s right of first refusal. Curran had cold-called Midway’s president, David Marofske, to ask for approval to sell it in the United States. On the day GCC signed with Atari, Macrae, Curran and Golson met Midway in secret. Midway, which was facing a financial squeeze, offered to buy Crazy Otto outright as an official sequel and pay GCC a royalty on every cabinet. The agreement was signed on 29 October 1981.

Midway wanted the familiar character back. The kit’s intermission cartoons showed a courtship and a baby, so the hero became a heroine, and the name changed in quick succession from Super Pac-Man to Pac-Woman to Miss Pac-Man (Midway’s choice) and, because of the baby, to Ms. Pac-Man, GCC’s suggestion; the final changes were made within 72 hours of production. Namco’s president, Masaya Nakamura, approved the concept with one note, reportedly: “Love the concept, get rid of the hair.” The bow stayed. The orange ghost was renamed Sue. Namco received the same royalty per cabinet as it had for Pac-Man.

Ms. Pac-Man was unveiled on 3 February 1982 at the Castle Park Entertainment Center in Sherman Oaks, California. Golson had said he would be happy with 20,000 sales. Midway sold about 125,000 cabinets by 1988, and the game grossed an estimated $1.2 billion in quarters by 1987. Cash Box and the American Amusement Machine Association ranked it the highest-grossing arcade game of 1982. GCC followed it with Jr. Pac-Man and Food Fight.

Who Owns Ms. Pac-Man

The royalties kept lawyers busy for four decades. GCC and Midway fought over merchandise royalties and settled in 1983. In 2008 Namco, by then Bandai Namco, made a separate agreement with GCC’s owners, leaving some royalty rights unresolved. In August 2019 the arcade-reissue company AtGames bought the GCC royalty rights and began selling Ms. Pac-Man products. Bandai Namco sued it for misrepresentation, false advertising, unfair competition and copyright infringement; the case was dismissed with prejudice on 27 October 2020 under a confidential settlement. From 2022, in Bandai Namco’s own re-releases of Pac-Man games, the character was replaced by a new one, Pac-Mom. Bandai Namco did not say why.

Dead End: The Kit Business

Enhancement kits had a clear market logic: arcade cabinets were expensive and durable, and the games inside them wore out with the players’ interest long before the hardware did. A kit sold the novelty without the cabinet. The courts and the manufacturers closed the trade from two sides. Midway v. Artic made an unlicensed modified game a derivative work, and the manufacturers protected their boards with encryption and bought or hired the kit makers. Atari paid GCC to stop; Midway bought its kit and turned it into the sequel.

GCC’s own route shows how the business ended: within three years of Super Missile Attack it had stopped making arcade kits and, from 1984, made hard disks and printers for the Macintosh.

Kill Screens

The code GCC read was small enough that its limits showed on screen. Early arcade games counted levels, timers and scores in single bytes, which hold the values 0 to 255, and few of their programmers expected anyone to play long enough to reach the end of the range. When a player did, the count wrapped around to zero or a calculation overflowed, and the game broke. Players called the result a kill screen: a level that cannot be completed, so that every game, however good the player, ends there.

The best-known case is Pac-Man’s level 256, where the routine that draws the fruit counter tries to draw 256 symbols and garbles half the maze. In Nintendo’s Donkey Kong (1981) the bonus timer for each round is calculated from the level number and stored in one byte. At level 22 the value should be 260, wraps to 4, and gives Jumpman about eight seconds before he dies; players first reached it in 1982. Its fixed position made the screen a goal in competitive play, and the scores of the players who reached it, among them Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, became the subject of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong and, later, of the score-verification dispute in which Twin Galaxies stripped Mitchell’s records in 2018. In early 2025 a speedrunner known as Kosmic passed the Donkey Kong kill screen for the first time, using emulator tools and a ladder glitch that required 24 joystick movements a second for eight and a half seconds; he said no human could do it unaided.