Ack! Man

First comes an alternating dark and light screen that announces with applause the arrival of something attempting to be a game. Ack! Man from 1989 is a crack at Pac-Man as imagined by whom? A swarming community of electronic mosquitoes. The total engineering elegance of a Czech copying machine.

The goal is clear: move through a maze, collect dots, flee from ghosts. The game plays out on a text screen, where your obstacles are made of dashes and tildes, the ghosts are letters or characters with the personality of a broken church. It's not the Pac-Man you know, but a distant echo from a taxidermist. Nineties editions at higher resolutions would comment on this ancestor as something between retro grumpiness and an archaeological oddity.

How does it play? Arrow keys or keyboard controls move your little character — supposedly — through the maze. The ghosts move according to a program that behaves like a person who forgot what a goal looks like and decided to just wander about. The game gives you a few lives and a score count that increments like unwinding paper tape in some ancient cash register. The fun lasts as long as it takes you to realize that the score is the only thing changing, and that's not a reason to keep playing.

From today's perspective, Ack! Man is part of electronic fossils. It's not that the game is old — many games from that era have charm today. It's that it tried to be clever or witty and face-planted when it missed the mark by a football field. It came from an era when every little quirk between computers was an experiment, and this was an attempt by someone who thought they knew Pac-Man from hearsay.

In an emulator or DOSBox, you can play it as a measure of invention. It's not bad that it exists, but when it exists next to Pac-Man, it feels like a guy in a shirt that says "I'm the kind of fun you won't take on vacation".