Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/01/company-claims-rights-to-ms-p.html
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It’s also known that AtGames sent their shitty Ms. Pacman arcade over to the original group that made the hack for Ms Pacman. This was during the period Bandai was in negotiations with them to buy the rights to the royalties, when the group saw the arcade machine from AtGames they thought that Bandai was behind it and it tanked the discussions. It got back to Bandai and they are now suing AtGames
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Great! Now i want to play Ms Pac Man real bad. I’d have been ok if i didn’t read this article 
On a more serious note, what a mess!
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Imagine “Gamergate” assholes back in the 1980’s, refusing to play the new “feminine” version of the game, despite that it was a much needed improvement over the o.g. Pac-Man.
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I had no idea, until not long ago, about the production craziness behind Ms Pac-Man; I had always assumed it was just something Namco/Bandai had put together. Then I got to play an original Crazy Otto conversion kit at an arcade museum, and the owner gave me a capsule history.
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I have to agree with Bandai Namco here. The right to collect royalty payments is not the right to manufacture new cabinets without Namco’s involvement. It just doesn’t follow. You see this fairly often, and unfortunately all rights holding parties generally need to be appeased to get anything out. Sega had to do a lot of this for their Megadrive Mini - it was a pain in the ass, but they did the work.
And unfortunately, AtGames has also completely soured their relations with BN with some ‘clevar’ moves.
Now I’m off to play some emulated Ms. Pac Man. It works fine.
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Improvements? Is Ms. Pac-Man a better game, then?
I know next to nothing about any of this.
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The linked article above is a fascinating oral history and deep dive into the making of it by a couple of MIT graduates who thought Pac-Man was too repetitive and predictable and decided to make an add-on to make the ghosts faster and smarter, mix up the mazes, make the fruit bonuses move around the screen, and add cinematic cut-scenes to give it more story. It was a massive hit because it was such a huge improvement over the existing most popular arcade game.
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I can see where that makes it a different (iterated) game. Is it more difficult to play than the original?
For some reason, I always assumed it was just a reskin done by Namco, and never played it. (To be honest, my association with arcade games has always been a superficial one.)
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Ms Pac-Man had a lot of legs. Years after release, it could still pull in a lot of quarters. It was common for a bar to have one in the corner where patrons could try their beer-lubricated muscle-memory on it.
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My (feminist) mother hated Ms Pac-Man. To here the original pac-man was sexless and Ms Pac-Man unneededly added gender into the game. Also she hated that the definition of ‘feminine’ apparently was a bow and lipstick.
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It warms my heart to see Intellectual Property realizing its divinely ordained goal of inventivizing content creators and increasing the availability of creative goods.
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Definitely requires more skill; the smarter ghosts and unpredictable mazes make it feel more like an exciting chase than just eating dots & running around. As @RickMycroft says, while Pac-Man feels slow and dated now, Ms Pac-Man still feels fresh, and essentially replaced Pac-Man in arcades.
The making-of article mentions that – originally the character was Crazy Otto, but when it turned into Ms Pac-Man, they tried giving her some red hair to set her apart, but Bandai said no to the hair; the iconic bow/lipstick was the last minute compromise.
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Oh, I can see how the developers arrived at this compromize (in 16x16 pixels). I just though my mothers opinion a funny contrast with the gamergate remark 
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Hopefully there was something in the original contractual language about forfeiting the rights to the royalties if you attempted to use the IP improperly or without authorization. That being said, it boggles my mind that there is still apparently enough interest in and therefore money to be made, from a nearly 40 year old video game. Nostalgic Gen X’ers apparently are willing and now able to pay for it I guess.
Reasonable copyright laws would prevent this sort of thing from being an issue.
For some reason I have a memory of seeing the original Crazy Otto version in an arcade. I wonder if this is real or if I saw the photo in Time and invented the memory. If the conversion kit made its way out of the Boston area to western MA I might have seen it at Ingleside Mall, which had the best arcade around.
The other big take is how much Namco was lowballing their bid that AtGames could just come in and buy those rights from them? Unless they were all acting out of spite.
There were also a huge number of Ms Pac-Man clone boards. Once the laws firmed up against straight copies, the cloners would tweak the name and graphics slightly.
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