The Odyssey² Today: K.C. Munchkin! (Odyssey²)

K.C. Munchkin! is perhaps the best known exclusive for the Odyssey², but it’s not really for the quality of its gameplay. Instead, its infamy comes from a court case where K.C. Munchkin! was accused of too closely copying the Pac-Man formula, and while the Odyssey² has plenty of games that are variations of preexisting titles, imitating a titan of early video games right before they could port their game to the Atari is what lead to this case. K.C. Munchkin! is, surprisingly, more different from Pac-Man than some other clones of the game I’ve played (3-Demon comes to mind) but the court case against it did establish precedent for how the look and feel of a video game relates to copyright. K.C. Munchkin! would be pulled from shelves, but not before leaving a unique mark on the video game medium.

 

Quite aptly, the appellate court noted that the features of Pac-Man that were changed for K.C. Munchkin! feel like they were using the original maze-muncher as a base but adding minor tweaks to that game’s elements to so they could identify as a new product. First of all, the character in K.C. Munchkin! (known interchangeably by either half of that name) moves around the maze munching dots, but he moves a bit differently from Pac-Man. The Munchkin (who looks a lot like Pac-Man while in motion) will only move in the direction you press, coming to a complete abrupt stop if you aren’t pressing anything. The other mix of the dot-munching formula comes from the behavior of the dots. Each maze arrangement only has 12 dots that start off in sets of 3 in the corners of the maze. Gradually, the dots will start moving through the maze themselves, getting a little faster with each dot consumed until the final dot is moving at a pace about equal to your own. Your goal of eating all the dots is complicated by the presence of 3 creatures who might as well be the ghosts from Pac-Man. Contact with any of them is an instant death but you can eat special dots in the maze to turn the tables and eat them instead. The small amount of dots and their movement is what makes K.C. Munchkin! feel a bit different from Pac-Man, the player having to chase down a few dots rather than passively collecting a bunch of them as they navigate a maze.

Play does stop after a single death and a victory in one maze just means replaying that maze over and over until you die, but when you start K.C. Munchkin! there is an incredible amount of options for selecting what kind of maze you wish to tackle. There are a few built in standards, a random maze arrangement option, and even the ability to make your own maze, but the variety is hurt a bit by a few issues with maze arrangement. Random arrangements or player made ones can easily cordon the player off from the enemies… or potentially lock them in with them with little hope of escaping. Segmenting the maze into areas that can only be accessed through one path or at specific times leads to too much waiting for things to be safe, but better designed mazes can sometimes be too easy to navigate. Since victory means repeating the stage to increase your points, it’s not hard to notice that some default mazes have obvious approaches to take to grab most the pellets. The enemies aren’t even too much of a concern in these simpler stages due to the special dots being fairly close together and easy to chain safely.

 

There are two variations that do change the maze navigation in an interesting way. The turnstile option will turn the central box into the only connection between the segments of the maze, the player having to wait inside it as it spins to go grab the dots in those sections. This, of course, faces the waiting issue, and an enemy might just end up sitting in the box oblivious to your need to use it, but the other mode is a bit more interesting. There is an option to move through invisible mazes, where the walls will only appear if you bring the Munchkin to a complete stop. You have to make a brief mental map for yourself to safely navigate the maze to munch all the dots, and the mazes are often just simple enough that you can take the brief stops needed to see the lay of the land. The maze maker mode can’t integrate these tricks though and you can’t save your created maze in any way. It is a hardware limitation that causes this issue, but it is a shame to put in the work to make something that can only pay off with a short play session that is erased when you turn off the game.

While maze design in the game is sort of all over the place in terms of quality, K.C. Munchkin!’s design issue mostly stems from the unusual behavior of the three enemies who are meant to be killing you. The three creatures are too stupid to really make themselves a constant threat you must be wary of but at the same time that stupidity means they’re incredibly unpredictable. Sometimes they’ll move together, sometimes they’ll spread out, but rarely do they seem to be chasing you, you just end up in situations where their seemingly random movements might corner you. The speed of play increases on each loop through the level, meaning that their aimless drifting becomes more deadly, but it doesn’t help with a few other issues their meandering causes. Getting powered up by the special dots does not really seem to affect their movement, the creatures cornering themselves or moving along like their life isn’t at risk, and when you do catch them, they’ll turn into ghost versions of themselves that need to go to the center box to regenerate. The only issue with that is they seem in no rush to get there, and the center box is always rotating its entrance to make it even harder for these mindless baddies to have a chance of returning to their dangerous forms.

 

Besides waiting on turnstiles and the like, the enemies being so brainless is the thing that holds K.C. Munchkin! back from being more enjoyable. The creatures have no idea how to navigate even the pre-built mazes, have no pathing that lets them find the way out of more complex mazes like the ones with turnstiles, and they don’t really try to bring themselves back to life. Chasing down the moving dots is not quite as fun when your opposition just hangs around rather than posing as a consistent threat that you must figure out how to avoid, leading to a game where finding the right difficulty balance is just a roll of a die with too many losing sides.

THE VERDICT: K.C. Munchkin! changed enough of Pac-Man’s basics to provide a different experience, but not all the changes were for the better. Chasing down a small amount of moving dots is a good first step, but the enemies barely seem to understand their purpose in this game and thus aren’t quite as fun to avoid or chomp. There is an incredible amount of maze variety thanks to randomization and the maze maker mode, but brain-dead enemies and some level designs with poor connections between maze sections can lead to the game becoming a dull waiting game a little too easy.

 

And so, I give K.C. Munchkin! for the Odyssey²…

A BAD rating. K.C. Munchkin! offers tons of mazes for you to play in, but in doing so it shows the value of curating such an experience. Random placement can lead to levels that are too easy or just involve a lot of waiting for things to fall in line, but there are some good designs to be found where chasing down the moving dots could have been a fun experience. Ideas like the turnstile and invisible maze have potential, but the things K.C. Munchkin! has going for it are ruined by the behavior of your opposition. The directionless wandering of the creatures makes them too random to predict and often too simple to avoid because of it. Sometimes the enemies accidentally close off access to an area and other times they won’t bother to revive, making finishing the level drawn out or guaranteed respectively. It’s understandable they didn’t want the enemies to be too aggressive, but having zero aggression and just happening to kill the player by chance undermines some of the other concepts that could have made this a decently challenging Pac-Man variation.

 

If K.C. Munchkin! had a clearer idea of what it wanted to be, perhaps it would have turned out better, but taking the Pac-Man formula and tweaking every part a little bit ended up with a mixed bag of mechanics that didn’t totally agree in the end. K.C. Munchkin!’s legal debacle is certainly more interesting than the product itself.