My favorite unfinished Pac-Man game

Heya friends I hope you are doing well. Are there any video games that were never published that you wish we had gotten? Today I wanted to vent about an arcade game we never got simply because it would have been the arcade successor to my favorite Pac-Man game. Mind you that I am not a fan of maze games, and I was never any good at Namco’s iconic Pac-Man. That said however I was a huge fan of the Bally Midway game Baby Pac-Man. The US developers expanded on the canon of the Pac universe, and helped influence the direction of Namco in Japan. For example Ms. Pac-Man was designed by General Computer Corporation, and published by Bally Midway in early 1982. This game started life as an illegal rom hack of Pac-Man. The same team developed Jr. Pac-Man a year later, and further expanded the Pac family. One of the most unique contributions to the Pac family was developed by Dave Nutting Associates. They created a hybrid arcade game that was part video game, and part pinball game. Baby Pac-Man came out in 1982, and there was nothing remotely like it before or since.

I was never good at the maze side of the game, but I was really good at the pinball side of it. It made sense to me that the Pac characters lent themselves to pinball. If only there was a way to create yellow steel balls to further the effect. Anyhow the game was also super rare. I only saw it at a few arcades out of the dozens that I visited. So whenever I saw one in the wild I knew I had to get a few plays in. It turned out that there was going to be a successor to Baby Pac-Man with the maze, and pinball mechanic that would have been even more ambitious. The cancelled Count Pacula game by Bally Midway would have actually featured multi-level screens for a vampire version of Pac-Man to explore. Instead of a nebulous series of neon maps Count Pacula would be going up, and down stairs in a haunted house / castle. Imagine how much more interesting the game would have looked with this sort of mechanic! The only thing that arcade fans would see was a design document, and a sketch of one of the maze floors.

The concept of a Dracula version of Pac-Man would be revisited in animation. Both the Hanna-Barbera Pac-Man show from the 1982, and the Ghostly Adventures of Pac-Man from 2013 had a story featuring the monster. As clever as those shows were fans still wanted to play a version of the proposed game. The closest we ever got was when Sk8rcow released a ROM hack of the NES game Devil World and turned it into a fan version of Count Pacula. The programmer added all sorts of animations, and variations of the classic Pac characters and ghosts to fit into the classic horror theme. It was a fun game that gave us a taste of how the video game portion would have turned out.

I think however that there was another game that audiences could have tried to get the horror maze feel. Back in 1982 Sega released their own maze game called Monster Bash. A later version for the Sega Master System home console called Ghost House was even more fleshed out. I remember my older brother being exceptionally good at Monster Bash. In it you would navigate through a maze filled with all sorts of monsters. The maps were labeled the Dracula House, Frankenstein Castle, and Chameleon Man Graveyard. You would gather portions of a magical sword which you could then use to hunt down the monsters.

The Sega game was considered one of the first arcade horror games, specifically inspired by the classic Universal Studios monsters. It was certainly one of the titles that I felt deserved a sequel. Fans would have to settle for Ghost House on their 8-bit console. With all that said more than 40 years later I still lamented the fact that we were never given a proper Count Pacula arcade cabinet. It’s one of those things that I’d like to design, and build if I had more talent, and a lot more money. At the very least I could honor the game that almost was by designing a poster for it. There’s something about classic horror, and iconic game characters that I think works very well together.

I hope you, and yours have a safe, and happy Halloween weekend. I’d like to know if you had a favorite horror game, or if there was a cancelled game project that you wish had been released. Tell me about it in the comments section. If you enjoy this blog there are several ways you can support me. You can sponsor me directly on Patreon. Or like and subscribe to my videos on YouTube. You can even subscribe to the Pink Monorail Podcast featuring my wife, and myself.