Timeline | 1982: Pac-Man for Atari 2600

Pac-Man was the biggest hit on the Atari 2600, just not big enough for Atari.

Pac-Man was released to Arcades in 1980 and was so popular that Atari immediately began production of a port for the Atari 2600 which was gaining popularity itself at the time. There was so much anticipation for the release of Pac-Man in 1982 that Atari ordered the production of 12 million copies of the game (more than the number of 2600s that had been sold to consumers by the time of the order). They changed the pack-in game for the Atari 2600 from 'Combat' to Pac-Man and heavily marketed the game.

A screenshot of Pac-Man the Arcade game

Pac-Man is a maze game in which the player has to navigate the entire maze to collect the glowing dots, and avoid the ghosts in the maze that are trying to kill you. If for some reason you have never played Pac-Man where the hell have you been! Get out there and play it, its great fun. The game was incredibly popular and spawned several sequels (Mrs. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Jr. etc.)

A screenshot of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600

Namco licensed Atari to do the american release of Pac-Man to the Atari 2600 home console (as they did with a lot of their Arcade games of the period, however Bally/Midway was licensed to make the us Arcade game). Unfortunately as Atari sometimes did, they pushed for a quick release and put less than adequate resourced into the production. The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man is unpolished at best (and horrible at worst) even taking into account the limitations of the system the graphics are horrid and the gameplay is clunky and fails to really translate the joy of the arcade game.

Due mostly to Atari packing the game in with the system for the second half of its existance and their heavy marketing, Pac-Man would go on to become the best selling game for the Atari 2600 at around 7 million copies. Unfortunately this was significantly less than Atari had first anticipated (it is unknown whether they were able to reuse the other copies or if they along with the extra E.T. games ended up in the same landfill(s)).

Further Reading:

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man