A sequel to Pac-Man (1980) published by Midway Games and developed by General Computer Corporation, Ms. Pac-Man was them first of the games not made by Namco. Similar to Pac-Man himself, Ms. Pac-Man must eat all the dots in the four mazes of her game and avoid the ghosts unless she eats a power pellet which then she would cause the ghastly pests to turn dark blue and try to flee, netting her a chance to chomp them down before they revert and become a threat to her once again. When she eats all the dots, the level will be complete and sometimes there will be intermissions in-between levels where she meets Pac-Man himself.
The game started life as a kit for modifiying machines of the first title into a game called Crazy Otto, but GCC could not risk being sued and sold their project to Midway with numerous names suggested such as Mrs. Pac-Man or Miss Pac-Man. Initially without Namco's consent, its president Masaya Nakamura stepped in and gave him his feedback on the design of this sequel's protagonist who became Ms. Pac-Man with each Ms. Pac-Man machine equating to the same amount of royalties as Pac-Man.
It proved to be a success with the gaming critics and influenced more of the Pac-Man franchise from merchandise to shows with Ms. Pac-Man appearing in Namco-developed games such as Pac-Land, Pac-Man World, Pac-Man Fever, and several other Pac-Man games. Ms. Pac-Man also saw her game ported to a wide variety of systems such as the NES, the Super NES (twice), the Sega Genesis, a variety of computers, and several collections in the Namco Museum collection of games.
Ms. Pac-Man chomps into tropes such as:
- Adapted Out: Sue does not appear in the Ms. Pac-Man port featured in Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures due to just having the same ghost cast as the first game.
- Delivery Stork: From the third cutscene on, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have a baby delivered to them by the stork. This was the inspiration for the lesser-known sequel, Jr. Pac-Man.
- Gender-Equal Ensemble: Going by Namco's stance that Pinky is female, Sue's pressence turns the ghosts appearing here into an equal gender ratio thanks to Inky and Blinky still being here.
- Konami Code: On the arcade cabinet Ms. Pac-Man & Galaga: Class of 1981, after inserting enough credits, keying in the slightly modified code "Up, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left", then pressing the Ms. Pac-Man start button will instead start the original Pac-Man. Additionally, inputting "Left, Right, Left, Right, Up, Up, Up, Fire" will enable fast speed in both Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Mannote , or revert to normal speed if fast speed is enabled by default on that machine.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: Similar to Pac-Man, this is averted early on; when Ms. Pac-Man eats a power pellet, the ghost monsters become vulnerable and our heroes have up to 10 seconds to attack their enemies for bonus points. After reaching the more difficult levels, the amount of time the monsters remain vulnerable to attack gradually decreases, until the 19th level where eating a power pellet does nothing to faze the monsters; they will reverse direction but Ms. Pac-Man must simply avoid their pursuers.
- Non-Indicative Difficulty:
- The cabinet can be set to a higher difficulty by the owner via a DIP switch. This will make Ms Pac-Man and the ghosts start on slightly faster speed and the power pellet effects wear off faster.
- Some players find the fast speed hack to be much easier than the original speed.note
- Screen Crunch: The Tengen console ports, rather than fitting the entire maze onto the screen (keep in mind that the original arcade game is designed for vertically-oriented monitors), decide to instead have the screen-wide maze scroll up and down. Not only does this mean you can't see the entire maze at once, which may be problematic if you are trying to escape ghosts or find the last few pellets, but in a 2-player simultaneous game, it is possible for one player to scroll the other player off the screen. There is a "Mini" set of mazes with minimal vertical scrolling, but it's much smaller in dimensions than arcade-spec mazes.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Sue is colored orange and is the fourth ghost of the game, similar to how Clyde is the fourth ghost for Pac-Man.
- The Smurfette Principle: Played straight in the port in Pac-Man 2 where Pinky is the only female ghost due to Clyde returning instead of Sue.
- Theme Tune Roll Call: It functions differently from Pac-Man in that it just gives the nicknames of each of the four ghosts one at a time as they are introduced and finishes with Ms. Pac-Man herself when she appears last.
- Updated Re-release: Tengen released an updated version of Ms. Pac-Man for the Sega Master System (
Europe-exclusive), NES (unlicensed), and Sega Genesis which featured more mazes than the original, as well as a "Pac-Booster" feature that could be activated by pressing a button or could be set to always be activated. Because of this, Tengen's unlicensed NES version of Ms. Pac-Man is better than Namco's licensed NES version of Ms. Pac-Man. Tengen's updated version of Ms. Pac-Man was also ported to the SNES and released by Williams Electronics.