Fans have noticed that Ms. Pac-Man looks a little different in the re-release of Pac-Land and it’s all due to legal reasons.
As much of an icon as Pac-Man is, it’s Ms. Pac-Man that’s regarded as the best of the original arcade games. Unfortunately for her fans, it looks like the character has been replaced.
Recently, the 1984 side-scroller Pac-Land, which trades the iconic mazes for 2D platforming, released as part of the Arcade Archives line-up. While it’s otherwise the exact same game, fans quickly noticed that Ms. Pac-Man looks completely different and seems to be based more on her appearance in the Pac-Man cartoon show of the early 80s.
Instead of her trademark red bow and boots, she now sports a pink hat with matching high heels and gloves. So why this bizarre change? While an explanation hasn’t been given, the answer is likely to do with a legal dispute involving the character.
Originally, Ms. Pac-Man was basically an official mod of the original Pac-Man game made by the General Computer Corporation (GCC), originally titled Crazy Otto. It presented the game to Midway, the American distributor of Pac-Man at the time, and it liked the idea enough to rebrand it and release it as an official sequel.
The rights to the Ms. Pac-Man name eventually went to publisher Namco (this was before it had merged with Bandai) but GCC continued to receive royalties. However, in 2019, things got complicated when another company called AtGames released a Ms. Pac-Man mini arcade cabinet, apparently without Bandai Namco’s permission.
Bandai Namco, unsurprisingly, filed a lawsuit against AtGames, but the latter revealed it had purchased the royalties interest from GCC. The whole ordeal was resolved in 2020, but details about the status of the royalties were never shared.
It’s assumed that Bandai Namco is eager to avoid making the situation any more complicated and, as a result, has phased Ms. Pac-Man out of the franchise. This would also explain why Ms. Pac-Man hasn’t seen any re-releases since and why the game is absent from the upcoming Pac-Man Museum+ compilation.
Ryan Silberman, who contributed to the Pac-Man: Birth Of An Icon history book, claims on Twitter to have been told that this redesign is technically a new character called Pac-Mom, who will also appear in Pac-Man Museum+. You can decide whether it’s just the same character in a new hat or if Pac-Man got divorced and found himself a second wife.
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