Pac-Man Celebrates 40th With Twitch, Minecraft, and AI
For Pac-Man’s 40th anniversary, Bandai Namco is giving fans three new ways to play the iconic title.
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For Pac-Man’s 40th anniversary, Bandai Namco is giving fans three new ways to play the iconic title.
At the end of 1979, 27-year-old Namco employee Toru Iwatani was eyeing three-quarters of a pizza when he thought of the idea for Pakkuman, a puck-shaped character who eats to survive. The official name was changed to Pac-Man prior to Western release (executives were rightfully fearful that Puck-Man would inspire clever vandals), and the game went on to gross nearly $1 billion in quarters after a single year.
Four decades later, Pac-Man is still easily identified both in and out of gaming circles. The franchise supports six titles, a cameo in a feature film, and one strange animated series called Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures. To celebrate the game’s 40th anniversary, Bandai Namco is releasing a brand new Minecraft DLC.
Players will be able to create their own maps, compete for high scores, and even chomp their way through 3D renditions of the classic game. Some of Minecraft’s in-game items, like dynamite, can be integrated into the Pac-Man mazes as well.
Pac-Man’s 40th anniversary also brings a free-to-play version of the game to Twitch called Pac-Man Live Studio that was made in collaboration with Amazon Games.
To top it all off, researchers at Nvidia announced that the release of the GameGAN project would coincide with the anniversary. GANs, simply put, are a type of neural network that use two competing AIs to learn new tasks. The GameGAN team used this machine-learning technology to create their own version of Pac-Man without using a game engine. As reported by IGN, the AI used an archive of 50,000 Pac-Man playthroughs to generate its “fully playable” version of the game.
Nvidia’s Pac-Man may not be ready for public consumption quite yet, but the game looks exactly like the original and even accepts player input to generate the images that are displayed on screen. To pull off this incredible feat, the program uses close to 84.4 billion transistors, which is 10 million times the number that was used by the original Pac-Man arcade machine.
Many anniversary parties for all-star titles give fans something like a spin-off or a remaster, but Pac-Man’s original form is so close to perfect that, 40 years later, all we can really do is come up with new (less efficient) ways to play the exact same game.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/pac-man-celebrates-40th-with-twitch-minecraft-and-ai/