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PacManhattan
By
Jen Chung
Published May 3, 2004
Modified Mar 6, 2008
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By
Jen Chung
Published May 3, 2004
Modified Mar 6, 2008
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Good weather. Cell phone. A working understanding of the Washington Square Park area. A PacMan or Ghost costume. WiFi. Ten people. These are the things that are needed when playing PacManhattan, which brings the seminal arcade game to the streets. Of course Gothamist loves this, as we dropped out of Saturday Chinese school just to watch the PacMan Saturday cartoon, which attempted to bring greater dimension to the PacMan mystique. Anyway, in PacManhattan, ghosts don't actually eat PacMan (they tag him) and there aren't real dots on the streets (just virtual ones). And the PacManhattan team has words for you if you think GPS would be a better way to go ("(1) GPS does not work well in "urban canyons", where the signal is reflected off large buildings and (2) we could not find an easy (read: cheap) way to send the geo-coordinate data from the GPS receiver back to the network."). Gothamist loves this, and besides wanting to play (you can sign up), we wonder if there could be a City Hall version of PacManhattan for city employees, who need to run crazy (and in costume).
The Other Page has put a narrative to the Pac Manhattan pictures.
Minneapolis had a bigger, less teched out, urban game, B.U.G., aka Big Urban Game, last fall.
Tagged
cell phone
chinese
city
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gothamist
manhattan
News: NYC
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The Other Page
washington
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wifi
Jen Chung
Jen Chung 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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