It looks like it was moved to Gamasutra at some point or perhaps was posted to both Gamasutra and the personal blog.
It's cool, for sure, and should be posted over and over, but I find it a little suspect to link to the print version; that sort of thing could be abused, because people could continue to post variations on the same link every day on HN. That could be bad, imo.
It was fascinating to see how individualized the ghosts were. even more sore that their names in the Japanese version hinted at their personalities, but we lost that in the translation to "Blinky, Inky, etc."
The article also explained a number of fascinating mysteries, such as how PacMan can move through a ghost sometimes and that Pac Man can take shortcuts around corners but ghosts can't.
It was also fascinating to read how the difficulty of the game was carefully stepped from level to level according to factors like time, number of dots eaten, etc. With a deceptively simple outlook, the game design had a lot under the hood.
I think a lot of the tidbits in here that aren't obvious to the casual observer is what separates the "good" clones from those with the same pieces but lacking the right "feel". I tried to follow along as much as possible (even reproducing the AI bugs) in my "hungry hank" homage.
The linked Don Hodges article about Level 256 is particularly fun to read, complete with a few proposed patches & a way to make the startup checksum still pass:
A fun quote - it certainly seems better to have an ending, even if it is not intended:
> "It is probably a good thing that Pac Man has this bug in its program. If it didn’t, expert players could conceivably be able to play the game indefinitely, because whenever they get tired they can just park Pac Man in the hiding places and leave the game to go eat, sleep, or whatever, and then return to the game and continue playing. The only limiting factor would have been the length of time that the game could run without a power outage or suffering from some other hardware failure. Experts would have been able to play the game for weeks, months, even years, or more."
Pacman seems in incredibly simple at first but as anyone who has created a clone knows, it contains a lot of intricacies that give it a unique character to it.
It's amazing that the developers were able to put that kind of thought and design into it given the tools and technology of the time.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossie...
Oddly this same link to the print version was posted 5 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12849017
And several other times:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20pac-man%20dossier&sort=b...
It looks like it was moved to Gamasutra at some point or perhaps was posted to both Gamasutra and the personal blog.
It's cool, for sure, and should be posted over and over, but I find it a little suspect to link to the print version; that sort of thing could be abused, because people could continue to post variations on the same link every day on HN. That could be bad, imo.