Professor Pac-Man coming at you from deep inside the bad-idea headquarters at Midway. Imagine this, it is the height of the video game crash of 1983 and Midway's latest offering is a dumb quiz game taking advantage of their otherwise popular Pac-Man franchise. People barely even want to put any money into good games like Crystal Castles, yet Midway thought that this game would be a hit.

It wasn't.

Midway only produced 400 of these bright yellow quiz machines. Nearly 75 percent of those were returned to them from the buyers. The ones that were returned were factory converted to Pac-Land, which is why you see a Pac-Land with Professor Pac-Man front art every once in a while.

There were supposed to be 3 different software versions of this game (standard, child, and prize), but it appears that only the standard version was ever produced. This game came in a yellow dedicated cabinet with blue t-molding and sticker sideart that showed Pac-Man with glasses and a mortarboard. The hardware to this game wasn't very well designed, and I don't think that there are more than 2 or 3 of them left today.

There is really no place that you can play this game today, it isn't emulated (as of Jan 2003), and I severely doubt if you will bump into one down at the local supermarket, but you really aren't missing much anyway.

Don't waste your time trying to purchase one of these, Pac-Man completists have driven the prices of even minor spare parts for this game into the four figure range.

sid saw one of these back in 1983, but he didn't get to play it for lack of quarters.

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