Acceptance of flaws: The story of love between two gamers for two critically panned games decades apart.

Hello its blogging time once again and this time I'm talking about a game that was one of the anticipated gifts I wanted to get for my birthday:

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition for the Nintendo Switch. released on November 11 2021, to celebrate Grand Theft Auto III's 20th anniversary; Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition was meant to be a compilation of three games in the Grand Theft Auto series: Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas remastered with visual enhancements and gameplay upgrades. But instead of being a welcomed treat for fans of the series who wanted to either relive memories or make new ones playing these titles for the first time, it ended up being a review bombed disaster criticized its technical problems, art direction, and character models, becoming one of the lowest-scoring games of 2021, and according to industry sources, the game's backlash resulted in Rockstar indefinitely canceling plans for remasters of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption and focusing on development for the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Despite the negative backlash, I was still interested in getting it! I've loved the GTA series since I saw GTA IV at the age of 11, and once I was able to play GTA IV and V after my brother left his Xbox 360 behind after leaving for college, I was hooked! But the original 3d era games were games I had never played before, let alone able to play when they were new.

Not only that, but it was available for the Switch! Rockstar have never really done any GTA game on a Nintendo platform. Sure, there were ports of GTA on Nintendo handhelds before but most of them were more similar to the original 2d GTA games and most of them weren't that memorable.

So to have a compilation of 3 GTA games on one cartridge that I could take with me, I was determined to get it! I actually wanted to get it for Christmas of 2021, but do to my family making a trip to Las Vegas that year, I had to wait till my birthday to get it. 7 months 1 day and an unexpected malfunctioned left switch joycon later, I have the game now and I'm happy with it!

But even while waiting to get the game, I realized something. The scenario of being somebody wanting and loving a game that was and is critically hated reminded of a familiar story of another game involving someone else I know in my family that felt the same way I did 40 years earlier: 

Pac-Man for Atari 2600. Released on March 16, 1982, The game was highly anticipated as Pac-Man was already one of the most popular arcade games at that time. 

At the time, Pac-Man was a huge phenomenon, The game was originally released in Japan on May 21, 1980, and North America on October 26, 1980. It was really the first video game that had actual identifiable characters instead of just simple pixels resembling basic shapes or vehicles. 

The original Pac-Man arcade cabinets: The original Japanese Namco version on the left, and the North American Bally Midway version on the right.

Because of this, the game could be easily licensed to various companies to make merchandise for. It had a sequel, dozens of spin-offs, a hit single, a huge amount of merchandise of all kinds from things like cereal and bedsheets to unconventional things like trashcans and toilet seats, and even a Saturday morning cartoon series. 

A picture from an issue of Popular Computing Magazine displaying the various Pac-Man merchandise available in various department stores (1982)

In both the US and Japan, it was an immediate success. Mainly because the game did what its creator, Toru Iwatani, wanted it would do, bring women into arcades. People of both genders and all ages loved the game, and it meant big money. In its first year on the market alone, Pac-Man arcade cabinets brought in more than one billion quarters! With that kind of success, Game makers naturally knew that an at-home version would probably make a killing. So, Atari landed the exclusive licensing rights to make Pac-Man on home consoles. By October of 1981, they had committed over $1.5 million to the project.

Atari themselves were no slouches in the video game industry at the time either, In 1972 they released Pong, the first commercially successful arcade game and over the next 10 years they were prime innovators in arcades (with titles like Asteroids), Home computers, (With the Atari 400 and 800), and home video game consoles (with the first home pong console launching in 1975). But in 1977 they released the Atari Video Computer System or VCS (latter called the 2600) and although it wasn't initially that successful, in 1980 the console gained a huge increase in popularity and sales by releasing a port of Taito's Space Invaders, making it the very first officially licensed port of an arcade game. 

With the port of Space Invaders being a success, naturally Atari started licensing other arcade games to port to the system and since Pac-Man was a huge seller in arcades they were confident that the port would be huge. They were so confident, they made 12 million copies more than the 10 million Atari 2600 consoles in American homes, hoping consumers would buy the console just so they could play Pac-Man.

Shortly after its release, Atari's Pac-Man became the best-selling Atari 2600 game of all time up to that point with tons of people buying the game just due to the name, much like Atari hoped for. But when they played it, It ended up looking like this: 

Yes, this is Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. The game barely resembled the original, and the gameplay had significant changes compared to its coin op counterpart. That's partly because Tod Frye, the Atari programmer who created the game, was forced to make a few key decisions that didn't play well with a lot of critics and fans. Due to the 2600's limited hardware, Frye simplified the maze's intricate pattern of corridors to a more repetitive pattern. The color scheme was changed in order to comply with Atari's official home product policy that only space-type games should feature black backgrounds. He also wanted it to be a two player game which ate into a considerable chunk of the 2600's 128 byte memory.

As a result, Critics attacked the game for its poor graphics, controls, and the ghost's distracting flicker. Many of the consumers who purchased the game were upset and asked for refunds. Overall, about 7 million Pac-Man cartridges were sold and Atari had to accept the losses with the extra 5 million unsold. To this day,  It is often considered one of the worst video games ever made and one of the worst arcade game ports released.

However among the many angry Pac-Man fans who shunned the game, there was one who did like the game. From the small upstate New York town of Plattsburgh, There was one gamer happy to get Pac-Man anyway he could and accepted the port the way it was. His name, Michael Devan, My dad.

He had loved Pac-Man from the first time he saw it in the arcade, and had received an Atari 2600 for Christmas of 1980. So when he saw the game for sale, he knew he had to have it because, just like me with GTA, it was the only available version of the game he could get for his console of choice at the time. Both the game and the console had a long happy life with him until college when he ultimately got rid of the console and all of the games.

Now 40 years later I think Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition will probably be the same way for me, among the many people who hate the game for its flaws it'll always be special to me.