12 Video Games Too Big To Fail (That Did Anyway)

5. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

Why It Was "Too Big"

Everybody knows Pac-Man, and just about everybody loves Pac-Man, so how could they not also love the idea of the arcade fave finally coming to home consoles with its 1982 release on the Atari 2600? It's as simple as that.

Why It Failed Anyway

Programmer Tod Frye was given no arcade specs to make porting the game to a home console easier, and had to recreate the entire thing from scratch, spending 80-hour weeks over a six-month period developing it.

In perhaps the first example of a disappointing gaming downgrade, the technical restrictions of the 2600's hardware also required Frye to severely lessen the visual fidelity and dynamic mechanics of the arcade game.

Atari, confident that it would sell no matter what, were apparently unconcerned by its lacking resemblance to the arcade version, and ordered 12 million cartridges to be manufactured, far in excess of the 10 million console owners at the time.

The Damage

Despite the rancid critical response, Pac-Man's sheer pervasive brand identity allowed it to become the best-selling Atari 2600 game of all time, even with an (at the time) unprecedented level of returned copies, which ultimately went on to cost them hugely.

And though Pac-Man's "success" helped make gaming more of a mainstream product, it also sewed the seeds of distrust among gamers, and is widely accepted to be a precursor to the outright industry crash caused by E.T. later that year.