wokka wokka wokka wokka wokka wokka wokka…

“‘Pretty much anyone could watch someone playing it for 10 seconds and understand everything about it,’ said Steve Meretzky, a veteran game designer who created famous Infocom titles like Leather Goddesses of Phobos and the game version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. ‘It was a game everyone felt comfortable playing, even in the setting of an arcade, and that’s why it became so universally popular.‘

Also turning thirty this weekend, those original Ghosts in the Machine — Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. Gratz, guys, and thanks for the handy, binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down reviewing scheme. (Oh, yes, it’s Pac-Man’s birthday too, and the coin-operated Google homepage today is a great way to pay one’s respects.)

The Watchdog. | Tales of the Pac Freighter.

By way of Bitten Tongue, the Peanuts characters take on the mantles of Watchmen. Charlie Brown with the power of Dr. Manhattan is a bit unnerving, and Linus seems like more of a Nite Owl-type, but Lucy as Silk Spectre and Schroeder as Ozy make perfect sense…and Rorschach is really just one bad day away from Joe Cool.

Also, via Quiddity and in keeping with the GitM theme, the plight of Pac Man gets reconfigured as a Tale of the Black Freighter. Game over, yellow fella.

Dot Dot Dot.

“Blinky: The most cunning and most dangerous: Fast and trying to corner you with direction changes. When he’s after you run quick and run twisty through lots of corners to shake (as with all others, cornering successive turn is most likely to lose the ghost)…Blinky owns and patrols the top right hand corner of the maze.” Having trouble with Ghosts in the Machine? DYFL points the way to a handy primer on how to excel at Pac-Man.