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PAC-MAN Glitch Becomes Supervillain in New Game

Pac-Man’s greatest adversary is making a comeback.

And it’s not the ghosts. It’s not Billy Mitchell. It’s not even the guys who thought that the Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures TV series was a good idea.

It’s the Glitch. Or more precisely, it’s the Level 256 glitch from the original Pac-Man arcade game. Highly skilled Pac-Man players (or people who use cheat codes in emulators) can make their way through the first 255 Pac-Man levels without a problem. Although the game was only meant to have 255 maps, a glitch created the unsolvable Level 256 that ultimately crashes the game. This is Pac-Man’s Kill Screen.

Pac-Man Kill Screen
Both Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man have Kill Screens of their own, but the Glitch never officially returned until now. Developer Hipster Whale has created a new Pac-Man mobile game for Bandai Namco called Pac-Man 256, and for the first time ever, the Glitch exists outside of the Kill Screen as the ultimate enemy for both Pac-Man and the ghosts. The Glitch pursues them across the game and devours the world like Galactus. Or perhaps Unicron is a better analogy.

In the first trailer for Pac-Man 256, the Glitch is depicted as a cloud of broken sprites as it chases down Pac-Man and frightens even the ghosts.

Pac-Man 256 is coming to mobile devices this summer as part of Pac-Man’s 35th anniversary. Pac-Man will also be making a big screen appearance this summer in the Pixels movie, which finds aliens using iconic video game characters to attack the Earth.

Alright, ghosties: share your thoughts on Pac-Man 256 and the Glitch in the comment section below!

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