The player controls the title character, who attempts to consume all of the wafers in a maze while avoiding four ghosts that pursue him.

Despite its commercial success, Pac-Man was panned by critics for poor graphics and sound, and for bearing little resemblance to the original game.

The player uses a joystick to control Pac-Man, navigating him through a maze of consumable dashes called video wafers, opposed by a quartet of multi-colored ghosts.

[5][6] The goal of the game is to earn a high score by having Pac-Man eat video wafers, power pills, vitamins and ghosts.

[5] The final consumable items are the Vitamins, which appear periodically directly below the nest and award the player with further points.

[11][12][13][14] The game no longers features collectible items such as fruits or the key, which are now replaced by the orange box called the vitamin.

To achieve the visual effect of wafers disappearing as Pac-Man eats them, the actual map of the maze was updated as the data was written into the Playfield registers, excluding those pellets that had been eaten.

The 2600's Player-Missile graphics system (sprites) was used for the remaining objects; the one-bit-wide Missiles were used to render the flashing power pills and the center of the vitamin.

This effect takes advantage of the slow phosphorescent fade of CRT monitors and the concept of persistence of vision, resulting in the image appearing to linger on screen longer,[20] but the flickering remains noticeable, and makes each individual ghost's color nearly impossible to discern.

[23] Frye chose to abandon plans for a flicker-management system to minimize the flashing in part because Atari didn't seem to care about that issue in its zeal to have the game released.

Another quality impact was his decision that two-player gameplay was important, which meant that the 23 bytes required to store the current difficulty, state of the dots on the current maze, remaining lives, and the score had to be doubled for a second player,[24] consuming 46 of the 2600's meager 128-byte memory, which precluded its use for additional game data and features.

[19] The company ran newspaper ads and promoted the product in catalogs, describing it as differing "slightly from the original".

[30] Continuing a long-standing relationship between it and Sears,[31] Atari also produced Pac-Man cartridges under the department store's label.

[32] At release, critics negatively compared the port to its original arcade form, panning the audio-visuals and gameplay.

Video Magazine admitted it was "challenging, and there are a few visual pluses", before lamenting, "Unfortunately those who cannot evaluate Pac-Man through lover's eyes are likely to be disappointed".

[47] Next Generation magazine editors in 1998 called it the "worst coin-op conversion of all time", and attributed the mass dissatisfaction to its poor quality.

[19] In 2006, IGN's Craig Harris echoed similar statements and listed it as the worst arcade conversion, citing poor audio-visuals that did not resemble the original.

[48] Another IGN editor, Levi Buchanan, described it as a "disastrous port", citing the color scheme and flickering ghosts.

[19] Video game industry researchers Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost attribute the poor reception to the technical differences between the 1977 Atari 2600 console and the 1980 arcade hardware used in Pac-Man cabinets.

[50] Initially, the excitement generated by Pac-Man's home release prompted retail stores to expand their inventory to sell video games.

[51] In retrospect, however, critics often cite Atari's Pac-Man as a major factor in the drop of consumer confidence in the company, which contributed to the video game crash of 1983.

Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Gamasutra stated that the game's poor quality damaged the company's reputation.

[49][52] Former Next Generation editor-in-chief Neil West attributes his longtime skepticism of Atari's quality to the disappointment he had from buying the game as a child.

[53] Montfort and Bogost stated that the game's negative reception seeded mistrust in retailers, which was reinforced by later factors that culminated in the crash.