8 Big Budget Video Games RUINED By Terrible Graphics
3. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
I know what you're all saying. How can a game for the Atari 2600, a console about as advanced a Rubik's Cube and with a lower resolution, have a game in its library that looks especially bad?
While it's true that the console was very limited in what it could achieve, titles such as Solaris and California Games managed to look pretty nice given their lack of resources.
This makes it all the more depressing that the Atari 2600 port of arcade marvel Pac-Man looks so blisteringly, appallingly dire. With a huge amount of copies ordered and an expensive marketing campaign, the development team predicted a simple conversion due to the game's success being based on gameplay and not visuals.
Not so, as anyone who has played Pac-Man remembers that it is full of visual personality and charm. The Atari port looked like absolute bumholes, with Pac-Man himself displaying barely any of his iconic features and the pursuing ghosts blinking at a seizure-inducing rate.
It may have the E. T. farce that ultimately caused the video game crash of 1983, but missteps such as this one certainly had a not-insignificant hand in it.