Okay, so apparently there’s this glitchy fucked-up version of Pac-Man out there that was uncovered by a guy named Berick Cook who claims the game’s original board was found locked up in a safe inside of an old abandoned arcade. What was he doing there? Maybe he searching for some other fucked up game called Polybius after listening to a podcast about it and decided to pursue a story. (You know how those weird investigative reporters are.) Who knows?
Anyways, Cook took the time to do some research on the exiled PacMan board and eventually found out that the game was locked up because players who finished it would suffer “severe psychological and occasionally physiological trauma, up to and including death.” What the hell, right?
So what did Cook do? He uploaded it for all of us to play, of course. He decided to copy the game’s original ROM and create his own version, calling it PacM̬̦̩̹̌͢a̪͓̮̼͍̗͑̿ͫn̛̥͈ͅ., and giving us all the opportunity to experience how this once-haunted version of Pac-Man fucked with a bunch of kids during the ‘80s in some local arcade.
The game’s unsettling to say the least. PacM̬̦̩̹̌͢a̪͓̮̼͍̗͑̿ͫn̛̥͈ͅ is Pac-Man, but there’s some weird bugs that seem to plague the entire game. For one, you can’t see shit, including any ghosts that are chasing after you. Power pellets don’t seem to work against warding off ghosts either, but they instead grant a few seconds of light that illuminates the level’s maze. Interestingly, each ghost displays its own distinct behaviors, meaning they don’t just sporadically roam around the maze waiting for you to accidentally run into them. Probably the most disturbing part about PacM̬̦̩̹̌͢a̪͓̮̼͍̗͑̿ͫn̛̥͈ͅ, though, is the game’s glitchy audio, which is way too abrasive to go unnoticed.
Play the game over at Cook’s itch.io. Oh, and don’t worry about suffering from severe psychological damage. According to Cook, the original ROM’s psychological effects have been significantly reduced for this version. Happy ghost hunting running.
[via Boing Boing]