Pacman

This is the original UNIX version of the Pac-Man game. Posted to the net.sources newsgroup as public domain in 1982 by Mark Horton.

The games was originally written by Dave Nixon while at AGS Computers Inc., in July 1981. It was converted to curses in Feb 1982 by Mark Horton.

Screenshots

#######################################      SCORE:      0       GAME: EASY
# . . . . . . . . ### . . . . . . . . #
# O ### . ##### . ### . ##### . ### O #
# . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #
# . ### . # . ########### . # . ### . #
# . . . . # . . . ### . . . # . . . . #
####### . ##### . ### . ##### . #######
      # . # . . . . . . . . # . #
      # . # . ### - - ### . # . #
####### . # . #         # . # . #######
        . . . # B I P C # . . .
####### . # . #         # . # . #######
      # . # . ########### . # . #
      # . # . . . . . . . . # . #
####### . # . ########### . # . #######
# . . . . . . . . ### . . . . . . . . #
# O ### . ##### . ### . ##### . ### O #
# . . # . . . . . @ . . . . . . # . . #
### . # . # . ########### . # . # . ###
# . . . . # . . . ### . . . # . . . . #
# . ########### . ### . ########### . #
# . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #      gold left =    185
#######################################      delay = 500, refresh =   1
@  @

Instructions

Attention: you are in a maze, being chased by monsters!

There is food scattered uniformly in the maze, marked by ".". One magic potion is available at each spot marked "O". Each potion will enable you to eat monsters for a limited duration. It will also scare them away. When you eat a monster it is regenerated, but this takes time. You can also regenerate yourself 3 times. Eating all the monsters results in further treasure appearing magically somewhere in the dungeon, marked by "$". There is a magic tunnel connecting the center left and center right parts of the dungeon. The monsters know about it!

    Type:   h or s  to move left
            l or f  to move right
            k or e  to move up
            j or c  to move down
            <space> to halt
            q       to quit

    Type:   1       easy game
            2       intelligent monsters
            3       very intelligent monsters

Download & Build

The latest sources are avilable on GitHub. Download and unpack in the usual manner.

To build you need ncurses, a C compiler, and make. On Ubuntu or other Debian GNU/Linux based systems you can get this using:

sudo apt install build-essential libncurses5-dev

Other Linux systems have similar packages. On FreeBSD you don't need anything in particular as long as you can fetch the tarball and have a working cc and make.

FreeBSD users can also download the true original from this mailing list entry https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-hackers&m=94345990014968&w=2