Pac-Man 99

» see nintendo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Pac-Man I know. Anyone born in 1984 knows Pac-Man, even in Ankara, even before the internet arrived, because the machine or a bootleg of it was in every arcade on earth. Pac-Man 99 I have only read about. It ran on a console I do not own, behind a subscription I have never paid for, and it existed for two and a half years.

The idea was Tetris 99's idea, worked out by the same publisher two years earlier: take an arcade game everybody already understands, run ninety nine copies of it simultaneously, and connect them so that doing well in yours hurts everyone else. In Pac-Man's case eating a power pellet and then a chain of ghosts sent Jammer Pac-Men into an opponent's maze, slow gray obstacles that got in the way of their dots. Last one alive won.

It worked better than it had any right to. Pac-Man is a game about route optimization under pressure, and adding ninety eight other people who can all make your route worse turns a forty-year-old design into something genuinely tense. Metacritic landed at 76. Arika developed it for Bandai Namco and it came out on 7 april 2021.

The important thing about it was never the design. It was the shelf it sat on. Pac-Man 99 was not sold. It was a benefit, downloadable at no cost provided you were paying Nintendo for online service, with paid DLC bolted on top for offline play and extra modes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ninety nine ~

There were three of these and only one is still running. Tetris 99 came in february 2019 and survives. Super Mario Bros. 35 arrived in october 2020 and was killed deliberately on 31 march 2021, a six-month product with the expiry date printed on it from the start. Pac-Man 99 lasted longest of the two that died.

The format made a real argument, which is that a lot of pre-1985 arcade design holds up fine once you give it a modern reason to be competitive. None of these games needed new mechanics. They needed ninety eight other people. That argument got made and proven, and then it was quietly withdrawn from sale.

~ the day it died ~

The end was announced on 16 may 2023 and executed in stages, which is unusually orderly for a shutdown. Paid custom themes came off the store on 8 august, and the Mode Unlock and Deluxe Pack DLC followed on 8 september. On 8 october the online matches stopped and the game stopped being downloadable for anyone who had not already got it.

Nintendo and Bandai Namco never said why. There was no statement about player numbers and no farewell letter. Everybody assumed a licensing term between the two companies had run out, and everybody is probably right, but assuming is all anyone has ever been able to do. The support page just says the service has ended.

~ what got buried with it ~

If you bought the offline DLC before the delisting you can still play it on your own for as long as the hardware lasts. Everyone else has nothing. The game cannot be bought at any price and cannot be redownloaded by an account that never had it, and the mode that made it worth playing does not exist in any form.

This is what a subscription benefit is. It looks like a game you have on your console and it behaves like a game you have on your console, right up until the two companies whose names are on it stop agreeing. There was no purchase to point at and no receipt to wave at anybody. That is the arrangement people accepted in exchange for the games arriving free, and Pac-Man 99 is the receipt for what it costs.

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