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Live Action Pac-Man Returns To Streets Of NYC
By
Jen Carlson
Published Jul 14, 2014
Modified Jul 14, 2014
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Jul 14, 2014
Modified Jul 14, 2014
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It's time to bring 8-bit aesthetic back to the streets of New York, as Pac-Manhattan returns for a 10 year anniversary celebration. The event, which will take place in DUMBO (Pac-Brooklyn?) this July 18th, is a live action recreation of the old arcade fave.
Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980's video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their 'little world' of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger 'real world' of street corners, and cities.
A player dressed as Pac-man will run around while attempting to collect all of the virtual 'dots' that run the length of the streets. Four players dressed as the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde will attempt to catch Pac-man before all of the dots are collected.
Using cell-phone contact, Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.
NYU Game Center Director (and Pac-Manhattan creator) Frank Lantz notes that "Pac-Manhattan brings an extreme physicality to the game. Not just in terms of the athletic skill and nontrivial endurance required, but also in the way that the physical details of the urban environment affect the gameplay. Traffic, pedestrians, lines of sight, and points of access—all the complicated and arbitrary concreteness of the world—these things that are abstracted out of the platonic geometry of the Pac-Man maze become the endlessly surprising contours of PacManhattan’s unpredictable terrain."
You can find more information here, but note that location information has not been updated (you will, however, find the rules).
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Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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