![]() A traditional love story of boy Pac meets girl Pac (while being chased by ghosts), boy and girl Pac chase one another and then a teeny little baby Pac is delivered via stork to form a full Pac family. Her game was faster and more varied than her husband’s, and in-between rounds spent dashing around its dot-filled mazes were some of the first and most iconic cutscenes in gaming. After a whirlwind of edits and a presentation to Namco that legitimized the entire project, Ms. So eager, in fact, that they ultimately gave up on waiting and embraced an American team’s conversion kit that transformed existing Pac-Man cabinets into an all-new sequel. Adjusted for inflation, it's made over $7,000,000,000 to date, most of that within just its first year of availability! After such insane success, it’s understandable that Midway, Pac-Man’s North American distributor, was more than eager for Namco to deliver a follow-up as the calendar flipped into 1982. The original Pac-Man had been a culture-shaking success in 1981 – an arcade game so popular that it's still the highest-grossing video game of all-time, entirely due to the sheer avalanche of quarters shoved into its coin slots over 30 years ago. The video game industry's first leading lady was created out of impatience. This is the death of Ryu Hayabusa’s father, the catalyst for his quest for revenge – and, in retrospect, the catalyst for how decades of other future video games would tell their tales as well! ![]() When they land, one remains standing – the other falls to the ground. The two of them leap their blades meet in mid-air. Or sometimes no dialogue at all! The greatest, most iconic cutscene of the game is its very first one, an entirely wordless scene depicting two ninjas clashing in a moonlit field. But serving as a slower-paced buffer between those fast-action levels were calm, thoughtful cutscenes containing simple exchanges of dialogue between characters. Its action scenes are fast and frenetic, featuring ninja hero Ryu Hayabusa leaping around the screen, clinging to walls and slashing enemies apart with his katana. Though early arcade games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had small story sequences accenting their play experiences, the true pioneer of the cutscene as we know it was Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden. Though some games have expertly woven their narratives into their gameplay, there are times when a movie-like storytelling experience can only be achieved by making games temporarily behave like movies do – removing all control from you and just having you watch some scene play out on the screen for a while. Cutscenes have become common in video games out of necessity.
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