World's Largest Pac-Man Machine

For Pac-Man's 46th US birthday, October 10th, 2026 (it was released in the US on 10/10/1980), I've recreated and released a playable, 3D version of the "World's Largest Pac-Man Machine" into Mike's Arcade.

What Is the "World's Largest Pac-Man Machine"?

It's an 8 foot, 8 inch tall Pac-Man machine, made as an attracter for arcades. It's made of a 224x288 grid of LED lights on a very large display. It has a custom floor extending from the display to a stand up control desk with joysticks and buttons for 2 simultaneous players.

What's the Difference between it and regular Pac-Man in game play?

The basic game play is the same. You have the same Pac-Man maze and ghosts and dots, but here are the major differences:

• 2 people can play on the same screen at the same time, so you have TWO Pac-Men chomping dots. Player 1 is yellow, Player 2 is green.
• It's faster paced
• Fruit does not show up in the center, instead it bounces in from a warp tunnel, like Ms. Pac-Man and it's rapidly changing through all the fruits. When you eat it, you get the points of whatever fruit it was at the moment you ate it, so scoring varies dramatically from 100 points up to 5,000 points.
• The screen doesn't have as many physical pixels as the classic CRT, so some layout changes are made:
• There's NOTHING below the maze
• Scoring, lives, fruit, etc... are all compacted up at the top.
• Attract mode is vastly different, advertising large bold letters of features and it supports up to 3 real-world advertisements. I did NOT implement the advertisement features in my recreation.
• After each maze is completed, there's a new screen showing both players' status for that level.
• It has a leaderboard (original Pac-Man has ONLY the highest score and the most recent played game score.
• Background music. It plays modern rave/DJ like fast beat music.
• The maze color. Original Pac-Man, the maze has blue walls. In WLPM, the walls are constantly changing colors.

What's Different between MY implementation and the Real one?

I don't know all the differences because I don't have access to a real version of the "World's Largest Pac-Man", so I'm going by what I've seen in videos and researching differences reported online. What I KNOW is different:

• The background music. I created my own that's in a similar rave DJ style with no attempt to copy theirs.
• Some of the animations on stats screens are a little different.
• Status screens look and behave similarly, but not identically.
• Leaderboard page when you enter your initials - real shows graphic PAC-MAN logo. Mine just shows equally large, but plan text "PAC-MAN".
• The advertisement features I did not implement.
• I added a service menu (hit TAB to see it for all sorts of options)
• Your games are recorded and stored in your local browser storage. You can replay to rewatch your played games and even intervene the playback and continue playing for real at any point (it's like the ultimate save game state).
• Hold down the Control key to make the game play at 2x speed (everything speeds up; you, the ghosts... everything).
• Hold down SHIFT to 2x just Pac-Man's speed. Everything else plays at 1x. This is a cheat.
• Any cheats you use during playback cause "MOD" to show up next to your recorded score in the leaderboard.

Where'd I get the code for Pac-Man?

I created my own JavaScript game engine to make games in the style of 80s classic arcade games then used that engine when writing Pac-Man from scratch in JavaScript. This is why it works in your browser and you don't have to download anything. My game engine and my version of the game are written in JavaScript. I used modern programming best practices and techniques. There's unlikely any similarity to how my version works vs the original. My goal was same arcade experience for the player, but fresh, new, modern code. One surprising result: I had a bug in my code that caused Pac-Man to occasionally pass THROUGH a Ghost. Turns out, this is EXACTLY for the same reason the original Pac-Man does it! I had fixed the bug, but when I found out that that same "feature" in Pac-Man was actually a bug and for the exact same reason, I added the bug back. It's caused by Pac-Man and a Ghost having a head on collision and as they both move a certain amount of pixels, since they're in opposite directions, the collision detector is loking for crossover in a certain range and from one frame where they haven't collided yet and the next, they may have both passed that barrier, so now they're still not in a collision state, and keep moving on.

Did You Use AI to write this?

Obviously, yes. In a year or two, people will see how silly of a question this is. Manual code writing is dead. As of this writing (2026/10/11), I've not written a SINGLE LINE OF CODE in 2.5+ years! The only ones still manually writing code are hobbyists that enjoy the process and companies that are far FAR behind. All companies will use AI for all code writing in the very near future. Many already are, including my employer. Those that don't will fail to compete and cease to exist. It's like a builder refusing to use power tools.

Where'd your Music come from?

I wrote it with a tool I created. It lets me easily create rave DJ style beats without really being a musician. I mean, I "play" guitar and keyboard and piano, but honestly, I'm not that good. I can play a few riffs on the guitair and I'm moderately OK on a piano, at best.

How'd You Create the 3D Models?

This one I have to talk about because AI is such a game changer. In fact, everything about this project is worth talking about AI. But the most dramatically visual change from pre-AI to post-AI is 3D. Before AI you'd have to use a 3D modeling program like Blender. Those are complicated and have a VERY HIGH learning curve. So much so, that I've never been able to justify the time for my minimal 3D wants. But now, I just told Claude and ChatGPT to research the demensions of these things and then create a 3D model. Claude surprised me and created an interactive 3D model in an HTML page for me to review with the click of a mouse button! Once I realized the power I have at my fingertips, I had it create sliders for making changes to specific items rather than wasting my time and my Claude tokens on multiple back and forths on making changes to the 3D, me reviewing it, telling it again to adjust it more... instead I just had it add sliders to the model page where I can slide them and see, in real time, the changes to the file. Once I made all my changes visually, I just click the copy button to get all the values I want and paste them into Claude, that then applies them and I'm done. It's utterly amazing compared to the old way.

Here it is. It's even PLAYING LIVE my WLPM game ON the 3D model in this view!