K. C. Munchkin! (Magnavox Odyssey 2 Review)

K. C. Munchkin!
aka Munchkin (EU) Come-Come II (South America)
Platform: Magnavox Odyssey 2
Released in 1981
Designed by Ed Averett
Developed by Magnavox
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Listing at Odyssey 2 Homepage

And can I just say how damn good the Odyssey 2 Homepage is? It’s so well done. Top notch resource site for an obscure console!

Part of me is wondering if K. C. Munchkin beating Atari’s efforts to the market and triggering the lawsuit is why Pac-Man 2600 was recklessly rushed through production. I’m not saying Magnavox is to blame for Pac-Man 2600, but I do legitimately wonder if they were motivated to not be undercut by anyone else.

K.C. Munchkin was the target of one of the most famous video game lawsuits of all time. Atari owned the home video game rights to Pac-Man, but Magnavox beat their horrible port to the market by a year with the non-horrible K. C. Munchkin. It’s a game where you guide a circle with a wedge cut out of it through a maze eating dots while avoiding colorful chasers, only you can turn the tables on the chasers by eating one of the four special pellets in the maze, which allows you to eat them. If that sounds a little too close to Pac-Man, well, the courts agreed. Atari was actually rejected in their first attempt to halt sales, but eventually a judge sided with them, noting the changes made to the game actually made the intent more obvious. I don’t know if I agree with that, but whatever. What makes me sad is, it didn’t have to be this way. Games that were inspired by Pac-Man would be the dominating genre in gaming for the next five years until Super Mario Bros. turned side-scrolling platformers into the talk of the town. K. C. certainly wasn’t the only game that was riding Pac-Man’s coattails, but the real problem was how obvious Magnavox’s intent was. This included box art and an ad campaign that I’ll generously describe as “foolish” but would more accurately describe as “YOU STUPID F*CKING MORONS! WHAT HELL DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?”

Thank you once again to the Odyssey 2 Homepage. Check them out!

I mean seriously! That actually looks more like Pac-Man than Atari’s concept art for Pac-Man around this time! The funny thing is, THAT looks like cover art you would expect for K. C. Munchkin to avoid getting accused of ripping off Pac-Man (sans the shirt, of course). God, this must have been fun to be a fly on a wall for! If for no other reason, to get high on the fumes.

(nods) Yeah, that’s real. If you’ve never seen it, that was the original concept art intended for Atari’s take on Pac-Man.

Sigh. Look, I’m not winning any friends siding with an evil corporation over here but there’s no way you can look at the box art/ad and not think that they were trying to deliberately trick unknowing consumers into thinking that their game, at the bare minimum, had SOME connection to Pac-Man or maybe even was Pac-Man under a different name. It’s just too close, and the courts ultimately ruled that an idea can’t be owned, only the expression of that idea. In other words, you can’t own the idea of a maze chase, but you absolutely can own the way Pac-Man is done and presented. In that regard, Magnavox’s advertising was probably more damaging for their case than the actual game content. From the neon blue maze to the shape of the not-ghosts to the shape of the mouth and the dots. And again, it didn’t have to be this way, because the actual game of K. C. Munchkin is different enough to stand tall on its own. Like, problematic as it is (and it’s a deeply flawed game) K. C. Munchkin is a seriously compelling video game based JUST on its content that feels more like a logical evolution of the Pac-Man formula than an attempt at a clone (and I hate that term).

Adjusting to the ever-increasing speed is one of the most disorienting sensations of any maze chase I’ve played. Oh and don’t worry if the maze looks like it can’t be solved.

I’m just going to use the Pac-Man terms. Why not?

The most obvious change is the maze itself is mostly empty. There’s three ghosts instead of four, and instead of every space having a dot, there’s only twelve dots total, four which are the energizers. Oh, and the dots move, making them functionally characters themselves. The fewer the dots remaining, the faster the dots move, really putting the “chase” into “maze chase.” It creates some VERY exciting final dot scenarios. As for the power pellets, they’re like janky versions of the energizers in Pac-Man, and so are the ghosts. When they’re chomped, their Earthly remains wander the maze until returning to the center to reform. If that sounds “nearly identical” to Pac-Man, trust me, only fifteen seconds of playing will confirm it’s not. There’s a few mechanical hiccups with the energizers. The first is that they wear off quickly, and when the “frightened” period starts wearing off, the blinking ghosts can actually kill you. “Blinking” is done by alternating from the “we can be eaten” pink to their normal color and if your timing when contact is made happens when a ghost is their normal color, you die. Huh. I’ve never seen THAT before. I wish I could say it’s as charming as the rest of the game but that aspect just gets annoying.

Maybe I just sucked at this but triple chomps were super, super, super rare. As in I can count how many times I did it on one hand and I’d have a finger or two left. EDIT: Actually, this isn’t true but I was thinking of when the ghosts actually spread out. I scored plenty of doubles and triples when they were clustered-up. Sigh. It’s been a long week.

The bigger mechanical problem is that the ghosts aren’t efficient at all about returning to life. Sometimes they wander the maze for quite a while. Longer even than the ghosts that get caught in roundabouts in Jr. Pac-Man. Not only does this lessen the scoring opportunities, but it sucks the excitement out of the game. Especially when all three are knocked-out. In the above maze, when I scored a rare triple chomp very early on a fresh cycle, I was almost able to clear the other dots completely before even the first ghost came back to life, and the other two weren’t even close to the center. As if that’s not bad enough, when the ghosts DO find their home, they could linger in that center box for a while before they actually do have flesh and can move around and kill you. It’s K. C. Munchkin’s Achilles heel, because it just is so much downtime for the antagonistic part of the game.

Another problem is that the ghosts move as fast as you do even when they’re frightened, removing all potential for chase downs and requiring that chomps are done exclusively by ambushing. Really, the differences between K. C. and Pac-Man are far more numerous than what any legal judgement was based on. See kids: grown-ups ruin everything.

Possibly the most notable change is that there’s no lives system. You play until you die, and then, after a brief pause (which allows you to also input your high score name, though it does NOT wait for you to finish) the game restarts on whatever map you selected when you booted up the game. I imagine this was something that was frustrating to Pac-Man fans back in the day, but the one life format actually feels very modern and certainly enhanced my experience, making K. C. Munchkin surprisingly addictive. There’s four preset mazes (seen below, and you have to use the 0 – 3 keys for them, not 1 – 4). I thought the second maze (keypad #1) was far and away the strongest as it lent itself to the energizers more. No chase-downs means you have to ambush, and there’s more chances for that in the second layout. By the way, the final dot moves as fast as the ghosts do and thus also has to be ambushed.

Maze if you press #0

Maze if you press #1

Maze if you press #2

Maze if you press #3

The final major change that adds value the overall game is that pressing #4 at the start of a game will make the maze randomly generated. Some of these ultimately were just slight variations on the existing mazes. Others leaned heavily into my least favorite maze chase twist: missing walls. However, to the game’s credit, the controls work better for wall-free mazes since K. C. doesn’t move automatically and is capable of stopping. You actually do have to press a direction to, you know, move. The random mazes can be fun and, as long as there’s no major missing walls, I like the shapes of the mazes in general. I also like that they’re asymmetrical and have dead ends, which is a neat twist on the formula. You might have also noticed that the fourth map looks kind of impossible. Well, the ghost house portion of the maze rotates like a turnstile regardless of what level you play. In addition to the typical Pac-Man tunnels, in some configurations of maze, the only way to access each corner of the maze is to wait in the ghost house for the opening to be facing in the correct direction. I’m guessing the rotating ghost house is also what throws off the simple ghost algorithm and causes massive delays in respawning that hurts the game as badly as it does.

I should also note that the Magnavox Odyssey 2 has half the RAM as the Atari 2600, so the fact that they pulled-off such a quality game from a complex genre with a MASSIVE limitation is pretty impressive. Those limitations are likely why the game has so many bonkers quirks. The energizers don’t target just the active ghosts, but instead create a global effect that works on a strict, absolute timer regardless of when you grab the energizer. In other words, if the ghosts are dead in the center of the maze and are just about to respawn when you grab an energizer, they will respawn completely chompable until the strict energizer timer runs out. Beat a level by grabbing an energizer last? The ghosts will start the next cycle chompable for however long you have left on the (invisible) timer. When I figured that out, the triple chomps happened a lot more frequently since the ghosts tend to stay clustered together early in most (but not all) levels. It’s janky but charmingly endearing and, yes, fun. As far as games that did the most things with the least resources, K. C. is up there.

Originally this was going to be a 2 in 1 review but two things happened. The first was I pulled the typical Cathy move of telling myself to only play long enough to get what I need for the review and I overshot it by many hours. Second, I liked the sequel so much more than the original that I want it to get its own feature.

As technically limited and, at times, frustrated by those limitations as it is, I liked K.C. Munchkin. It’s good enough that it’s not very hard to imagine a child of the early 80s who had an Odyssey 2 instead of an Atari telling kids at school they got the better deal. I certainly liked it more than some of the Atari 2600 maze chase games I’ve played. Like, no joke, I would take this over 2600 Ms. Pac-Man. Really, the only one I can think of off the top of my head that I’d rather play is Jr. Pac-Man for the 2600, which I felt was maybe the best Atari 2600 title. With most 2600 maze chases, there’s a coin-op that does the same thing better, or it just doesn’t offer enough originality or twists. K. C Munchkin is different enough that saying “it’s like Pac-Man” is accurate and an injustice. I haven’t really played anything else like it, and the original concepts it brings combined with the addictive one-life structure make it hold up spiritually if not mechanically. So my first (published) Odyssey 2 review cruises to an easy YES! Yet, I’m still sad. One of my primary goals here at Indie Gamer Chick is to unearth hidden gems for people my age or younger and remind game publishers that you have so much more than the same old big name milestone games in your catalogs. But K. C. Munchkin is unlikely to ever get a re-release.

Oh Christ, there’s even Spider-Man on the Odyssey 2. Well, a prototype of a port of the Atari 2600 game. I’ll be doing more with the O2 in the near future. Watch for the review to K. C.’s Krazy Chase at IGC soon.

I wish that all the parties who own the legacies of these gaming devices could come together and make a deal and put the two K. C. Munchkin games in a modern retro set. Like, shove them in as a bonus feature in Atari 50 DLC based around the actual software and hardware that went head-to-head with Atari. Interview the parties involved and have a laugh over it and offer a toast to the actual unique gameplay merits of K. C. Munchkin. There’s plenty. Besides, K. C. Munchkin did make history. Not the kind of history it hoped for maybe, but history nonetheless. The real victim of this is designer Ed Averett. I’m sure he was given orders by higher ups to make “their Pac-Man” and so maybe in a roundabout way he gets tagged with being the guy “who ripped” off Pac-Man. Except, he didn’t. He built upon it, like so many developers of the era did. What he accomplished with so little hardware (heh, just wait until you see what the same designer did with the sequel. It’s AWESOME and original) is something that should be celebrated. Will K. C. Munchkin get a re-release? Probably not, but there is no better game that modern publishers could give a prestige retro re-release to prove that, yes indeed, time does heal all wounds.
Verdict: YES!