Pac-Man Gets Its Own Mario Maker Clone

Now here’s a fun little story.

As you might have heard around the web, today we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of Pac Man, the little yellow man who escalated games from a neat diversion to a pop-culture phenomenon, and the guy who put the Japanese on the map, at least as far as the games industry is concerned. Bandai Namco has been celebrating the occasion with a slew of new announcements and projects, most of which are in Japanese. So I can’t read it.

But there is one project that’s been translated to English: a nifty new project called Pac-Man Live Studio, which has not one, but two interesting gimmicks that warrant special attention.

On paper, Pac-Man Live Studio is little more than a Mario Maker version of Pac-Man – specifically, not only can you use it to play the classics, you can use it to make your own Pac-Man Mazes and share them with others. That in itself is pretty cool, but here’s where it gets spicy.

The first unique gimmick is that the game has co-op, which might not be a first for the franchise – it’s been around since Pac-Man Championship Edition – but it’s still different enough from what you’d expect from a Pac-Man game that it warrants a little shout out. Plus, the ability to make and play maps with your friends sounds like a genuinely fun time.

But here’s where things get really spicy: apparently, the game (when it comes out, which should be “soon”) will live exclusively on Twitch. That’s right, instead of downloading the game, you’ll just log into Twitch and start playing it from there, which will not only save you some system memory, it will also make it easy to share your creations with the world. Of course it also means you can’t play if you don’t have a good internet connection, and that Twitch functionally owns everything you create and do, but… gimmicks can be good or bad, there’s nothing inherently good about the word.

Anyway, it might be a while before we hear from this again, but now at least you know.