The switch would seem to result from the longstanding legal tangle that resulted from Ms. Pac-Man’s unusual creation. Again, outlets such as Polygon have already told this story in detail, but the gist of it is that some royalties associated with Ms. Pac-Man were never fully resolved to Namco’s liking. That didn’t prevent the company from using the character in subsequent games until 2020, when a lawsuit was settled out of court between Namco and AtGames, an American retrogaming company that bought the Ms. Pac-Man royalty rights from General Computer Corporation. (The Pac-Man Wiki has an entire page devoted to legal issues relating to Ms. Pac-Man, in case you want to read more. She’s a complicated lady!) Namco has not explicitly said that it has dropped Ms. Pac-Man following that settlement, but this is what those of us watching have concluded. Why else would Namco invent this Pac-Mom abomination all of a sudden?
Some Pac-Man fans are confused by this, and I’d bet a fair number of them are simply annoyed with Namco playing fast and loose with video game history. After all, this would be like if Nintendo re-released a Super Mario game and swapped out Princess Peach for a Princess Pineapple or Princess Pumpkin and just acted like it wasn’t weird. From my perspective, dropping Ms. Pac-Man is additionally discourteous just because the character and the game marked a crucial milestone in the industry pivoting to acknowledge to female gamers.
What’s more, I really like how at least early on, the character had this feminist bent to her while also being sexy, just because so often that was not the stereotype we got in the 1980s and 1990s for any women supporting gender equality. That’s maybe a lot to hang on a sexy piece of cabinet art and political implications of using Ms. over Mrs. or Miss, I’ll admit, but to pivot from the character depicted at the beginning of this essay to something called Pac-Mom makes me think Namco misunderstood the situation. To reiterate, Ms. as a courtesy title allowed women to define themselves on their own terms, not in relation to whether they’re married. Calling this new character Pac-Mom literally defines her in relation to other characters — her kids.
To make matters worse, she’s not given even a glimmer of Ms. Pac-Man’s sexy style. Okay, she has heels, but to invoke another Simpsons joke, she looks like a Pac-Man equivalent of the Malibu Stacy doll that was given a new pink hat to foil Lisa’s attempt at introducing a doll with a more feminist bent. There’s just not much to like about Pac-Mom, especially in comparison to who she’s replacing.
Pac of the Clones
Here’s the thing, though: While Pac-Mom got headlines in gaming press when she appeared in Pac-Man Museum+, she’s only the latest offering by Namco as some kind of Ms. Pac-Man replacement. There does exist a longstanding rumor that the Japanese gaming company was never completely happy with her debut video game, either because of the aforementioned royalty payments or because she originated outside the company. Hell, maybe Namco wanted someone a little more demure than the sexpot in the cabinet art. I don’t know if any of that is true, but it does raise the question of why Namco kept testing out new characters that were essentially less interesting versions of Ms. Pac-Man. I can’t think of another major video game franchise that did this, in fact. For comparison’s sake, the Sonic franchise has introduced scads of new female characters over the years but has never created someone who seemed to be a replacement for Sonic’s chief female counterpart, Amy Rose.
As early as 1983, just a year after Ms. Pac-Man was released, Namco was trying to pair Pac-Man with a female counterpart of their own making. In Pac & Pal, the titular pal is Miru, who is a ghost but a friendly one. She is controlled by the computer and helps Pac-Man collect fruit. However, every fruit Miru collects lowers the maximum amount of points that the player can rack up, so in addition to navigating the maze and avoiding the ghost, there’s an added challenge in collecting all the fruit before Miru can.