Pac-Man Fever: Prepare for the Pin-pocalypse

As you are well aware by now, LEGO has released their latest Icons set that pays tribute to another pioneer of the video game era; Pac-Man. As I am sure you are also aware, in the early 1980s, Pac-Man was a mega craze in video game arcades all around the world. In the United States alone, it was estimated to have 30 million active players in 1982… and I could be counted among them.

As a young kid, I remember a bunch of us excitedly piling into the car of someone’s older brother to go to a local department store where the game had been spotted - and piling quarters into the coin slots. I also remember being just tall enough not to need a step stool to reach the control stick. Ah, nostalgia.

A few weekends ago, I went to a local game bar with tons of retro arcade games (Rec-Bar) to see if I could relive that moment from my youth. They did not have the console cabinet of the original, but I did find many other members of the Pac-Man family. You see, the original Pac-Man game eventually led to numerous sequels and spin-offs; Ms. Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man which incorporated a mini pin-ball game, Pac-Man Battle Royale which was direct player vs. player version, and on-and-on. Of all these, I think Ms. Pac-Man was the universal favorite, due to the variety of the mazes and cut-scenes during intermissions.

Getting back to LEGO’s tribute to the original game, I thought who better to wax nostalgic with about Pac-Man than Paul Hetherington? The tiki-bar aficionado had already built his own tribute, and he would be displaying it just down the road from me at BrickUniverse, Lexington, KY (June 3rd-4th). My idea was to build the set in advance and bring it to compare side-by-side to his MOC. I would get his overall thoughts on the set, as well as on his approaches to building all-things-nostalgia… But first, of course, I had to build the set.

Pac-Man munching away at THE Instructions progress bar…

Quick Build Thoughts

When people ask me “What is your favorite LEGO set?” I invariably answer “Any set that I am not obligated to build before I can use the parts for something else.” I am a MOC builder after all. Since we avoid traditional set reviews at BrickNerd, I could have easily gone crazy and built something entirely different using the parts too… and yet in the end, I went against all instinct and chose to build this Pac-Man set as-is.

Functions video via Tiago Catarino.

It was seeing those slick videos from LEGO that tempted me; The demonstration of all the play features had me thinking, “Oh man, that’s awesome! I wonder how that works?… Maybe I won’t mind building this after all.” If I had only known…

Hey!… that looks fun!

While we don’t do traditional set reviews at BrickNerd, there is something I have to address based on my building experience of this set; Attaching those new Technic friction pins into this build was absolute torture! Compared to their prior version, they require too much force, are not easy to align into holes, and there is no affirming ‘click’ to know if they are fully inserted.

Brickset has already called out these redesigned pins in their history of Technic pins article: “The slots that ran lengthwise either side of the central raised section have been removed which makes it much more difficult to insert and, especially, remove. It's not quite as bad as the original 1980s version, but almost.”

Rambling Brick has also written an article on this redesign, asking “What if they introduced a new Technic pin, and nobody noticed?”… Well, I can tell you with absolute certainty that I most definitely noticed.

Looking at the assembly, if instead of a Pac-Man set you were hoping to see a new Medieval set to buy this summer, not to worry. You don’t need to wait for the next Classic Castle set to arrive. LEGO went “absolutely Medieval” on us with this torture rack of over 300 friction pins to assemble. The person(s) at The LEGO Group responsible for making the change to the friction Technic pins should be required to build this Pac-Man set at least once a week, from now until that injection mold finally gets redesigned again.

“The Rack” - The torture will continue until morale improves (or the design of THE Friction Pin does).

This was a real shame. As others have said in their reviews, this is a great design overall, with creative play features, slick aesthetics, and some clever SNOT techniques to create the interesting angles of the screen and façade. Unfortunately, the literal pain in my hands took away from the actual enjoyment I should have had while discovering these things as I built this set.

They say “misery loves company”, so I was hoping more blogs might call out this assembly issue in their reviews. There were none that I saw, at least at the time of me writing this; they only ever mentioned the repetitiveness of it all. Since I didn’t find any company in the misery of other LEGO bloggers, I would just have to find it in a good friend touring the countryside with BrickUniverse. It was time to head over to Lexington and meet up with Paul.

Taking Pac-Man to the Public

Set up for BrickUniverse Lexington was on June 2nd, just one day after the Pac-Man set became available for order online to LEGO VIP members. After getting my own builds placed onto my display tables, I headed over to Paul’s section to catch up and then get his thoughts on the new set. After a quick demo of the various features of the set, this is what he had to say:

“Wow. LEGO is really raising the bar with these sets. Typically it is the AFOL MOC building community that has pushed the boundaries of the brick. As more and more of those AFOLs become set designers at LEGO, it is no wonder they are putting out more sets like these.”… and then added, “They can go ahead and take my money already. This is another set that I am going to have to buy.”

A side-by-side comparison… Quite a difference of SCale.

When comparing Paul’s MOC side-by-side with the set, you can see the massive difference in scale. For Paul, the key game details that he wanted to incorporate were the “chomping” motion of Pac-Man, the side-to-side wandering of the ghosts, their pixilated look, and brick building the Pac-Man logo across the top. These all necessitated building the MOC at a larger scale. In the LEGO set, their Pac-Man and ghosts placed on top of the game have much more rounded shapes, and they put importance on mimicking the gameplay action of the maze-chase across the entire screen.

I thought that the public attendees might also like to see the LEGO set and MOC placed side-by-side… so for a second time that week, I went against my personal building principles. This time it was by displaying an official LEGO set at a convention. “Sacrilege!” I could at least justify it for the purposes of this article, as well as for it being something that the attendees would not have seen in public yet (especially so soon after the embargo date).

Functions video via Tiago Catarino.

To say there were quite a few requests for a set demo would be an understatement. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of people’s reactions as they were trying out the features; turning the cranks, asking if the other white button does anything, and watching Pac-Man being chased round and round the maze. What I can tell you though is that the set put very large smiles on people’s faces.

During the quiet times of the expo, I let kids operate the features of the set and they all were entranced by the screen. (Hey! Just like a real video game!) When the adults operated it, you could see the nostalgia set in… It’s too bad I wasn’t working on commission, as a lot of future set sales were made over those two days.

Talking with Paul again later about the power of nostalgia, he has found that it plays a large part in which photography prints people decide to buy of his various MOCs. Many purchasers are merely huge fans of the subject matter (Scooby-Doo, Tintin, Doctor Who, etc.), and the fact that it is a brick-built model is almost completely incidental. The same could likely be said for many LEGO Icons sets.

“And I would have gotten away with Paul’s coffee TOO, if it wasn’t for those meddling BrickNerds!”

This pull of nostalgia is something that LEGO knows all too well, whether through the demand for these Icons sets or through aging AFOLs clamoring for Classic Castles or for bringing back Bionicle. Based on the positive reception I have seen during the Lexington show, it is certain to me that more of these nostalgic sets from LEGO will be hitting store shelves in the months and years ahead. My vote for the next game tribute would be Centipede… but I am willing to wait for it until after the next redesign of those technic pins.

“Continue Game?… 10… 9… 8… “

LEGO Icons 10323 Pac-Man Arcade is available now for around $270 US.

DISCLAIMER: This set was provided to BrickNerd by LEGO. Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

What nostalgic game from your past would you like to see LEGO release as a set next? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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