| Snack Attack II | |
|---|---|
 Box for Snack Attack II | |
| Developer(s) | Dan Illowsky Michael Abrash |
| Publisher(s) | Funtastic |
| Platform(s) | IBM PC |
| Release | 1982 |
| Genre(s) | Arcade |
Snack Attack II is a Pac-Man -inspired maze game released as a self-booting disk for IBM PC compatibles. It was written by Dan Illowsky and Michael Abrash and published by Funtastic in 1982. [1] The game is a sequel to the Apple II game Snack Attack published by Datamost.
Richard Cook for PC World said "Snack Attack II is a simple but polished program; no problems interfere with serious gumdrop gobbling. This game's improvements over Pac Man – the speedup of the mouth after it gobbles an apple, the safety boxes, the skill levels, and the different mazes – give it an edge over its famous predecessor." [2]
Will Fastie for Creative Computing said "as far as I'm concerned, it's the best arcade-style game currently available for the IBM PC. The game is Snack Attack II. It's a Pac-Man clone. It's addictive and tough. It's well-built. It's fun." [3]
Corey Sandler for PC Magazine said "Snack Attack II looks like, sounds like, plays like – and if you really want to anthropomorphize its hero – tastes like old friend Pac-Man. Only it's been subtly improved." [4]
Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.
Michael Abrash is an American programmer and technical writer. He is best known for his magazine articles and books on code optimization and graphics for IBM PC compatibles and for working at id Software in the mid-1990s on the rendering technology for Quake. Since 2014, he has been the chief scientist of Oculus VR, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms.
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Fueled by the previous year's release of the colorful and appealing Pac-Man, the audience for arcade video games in 1981 became much wider. Pac-Man influenced maze games began appearing in arcades and on home systems. Pac-Man was the highest grossing video game for the second year in a row. Nintendo's Donkey Kong defined the platform game genre, while Konami's Scramble established scrolling shooters. The lesser known Jump Bug combined the two concepts into both the first scrolling platform game and the first platform shooter. Other arcade hits released in 1981 include Defender, Frogger, and the Galaxian sequel Galaga.
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Oil's Well is a video game published by Sierra On-Line in 1983. The game was written for the Atari 8-bit computers by Thomas J. Mitchell. Oil's Well is similar to the 1982 arcade game Anteater, re-themed to be about drilling for oil instead of a hungry insectivore. Ports were released in 1983 for the Apple II and Commodore 64, in 1984 for ColecoVision and the IBM PC, then in 1985 for MSX and the Sharp X1. A version with improved visuals and without Mitchell's involvement was released for MS-DOS in 1990.
Pac-Man is a 1982 maze video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. under official license by Namco, and an adaptation of the 1980 arcade game Pac-Man. The player controls the title character, who attempts to consume all of the wafers in a maze while avoiding four ghosts that pursue him. Eating flashing wafers at the corners of the screen causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue and flee, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. Once eaten, a ghost is reduced to a pair of eyes, which return to the center of the maze to be restored.
The Prisoner 2 is a video game published in 1982 by Edu-Ware. It is a remake of the 1980 game The Prisoner.
Jawbreaker is a Pac-Man clone programmed by John Harris for Atari 8-bit computers and published by On-Line Systems. Released in 1981 before an official version of Pac-Man was available, it was widely lauded by reviewers and became a major seller. The story of its creation and Harris's Atari 8-bit implementation of Frogger form a portion of Steven Levy's 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Snack Attack is a maze video game developed by Dan Illowsky for the Apple II and published by Datamost in 1981. Snack Attack is a Pac-Man clone.
Following the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer, or IBM PC, many other personal computer architectures became extinct within just a few years. It led to a wave of IBM PC compatible systems being released.
Microsoft Flight Simulator, commonly known as Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0, is a flight simulator video game, released in November 1982 for the IBM PC. It is the first release in the Microsoft Flight Simulator series.
World's Biggest Pac-Man is a browser game created by Australian website designer Soap Creative along with Microsoft and Namco Bandai Games. It is a Pac-Man game which differed from the original by having multiple players play together in a series of user-created, customizable and interlocking mazes. The game was announced at the Microsoft MIX Developer Conference on 13 April 2011.