Talking with Paul again later about the power of nostalgia, he has found that it plays a large part in which photography prints people decide to buy of his various MOCs. (Hey! Just like a real video game!) When the adults operated it, you could see the nostalgia set in… It’s too bad I wasn’t working on commission, as a lot of future set sales were made over those two days. What I can tell you though is that the set put very large smiles on people’s faces.ĭuring the quiet times of the expo, I let kids operate the features of the set and they all were entranced by the screen. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of people’s reactions as they were trying out the features turning the cranks, asking if the other white button does anything, and watching Pac-Man being chased round and round the maze. To say there were quite a few requests for a set demo would be an understatement. “ Sacrilege! ” I could at least justify it for the purposes of this article, as well as for it being something that the attendees would not have seen in public yet (especially so soon after the embargo date). This time it was by displaying an official LEGO set at a convention. I thought that the public attendees might also like to see the LEGO set and MOC placed side-by-side… so for a second time that week, I went against my personal building principles. In the LEGO set, their Pac-Man and ghosts placed on top of the game have much more rounded shapes, and they put importance on mimicking the gameplay action of the maze-chase across the entire screen. These all necessitated building the MOC at a larger scale. For Paul, the key game details that he wanted to incorporate were the “chomping” motion of Pac-Man, the side-to-side wandering of the ghosts, their pixilated look, and brick building the Pac-Man logo across the top. You can order the Pac-Man Fever CD from Buckner and Garcia’s official website at for $9.95 plus $2.55 shipping and handling.When comparing Paul’s MOC side-by-side with the set, you can see the massive difference in scale. You can no longer hear someone ordering a pastrami sandwich at the beginning of the title track “Pac-Man Fever”. One last difference between the original and the new CD. They cleverly substituted the sounds of a real cat, dog and hawk. I must make a note that they were unable to find samples for the game Mousetrap, as its sound had not yet been emulated in MAME™. The original album, due to the limitations of its media, was never able to obtain the fidelity achieved with this CD. I say almost because the quality of the music and lyrics as well as the samples used in each song are unbelievably clear and very easy to pick out. The result: a fantastically reproduced album, almost indistinguishable from the original. Since these 20+-year-old games are no longer available at the local arcades, they had to enlist the help of MAME™ (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) to obtain the samples. For those of you that remember the original album, the songs were mixed with samples from each of the games, which had been painstakingly recorded at local arcades by Buckner and Garcia. CBS refused Buckner and Garcia access to the masters of their original album, so they decided to re-record the whole thing. Yes, they had an entire album of video game hits, not just the well-known title track. In 1999, Buckner and Garcia decided to meet that demand by releasing Pac-Man Fever, The Album on CD. Great news! As the demand for classic video games increased, so did the demand for related items, including songs like “Pac-Man Fever”. And maybe, like me, you wore the grooves right off the record playing it so many times. Maybe you even owned the record like I did. You may remember hearing the song “Pac-Man Fever” on the radio in the early 80’s.
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