44 years ago (22 May 1980 to be precise), the first Puck Man machine was placed in an arcade in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, starting a worldwide global videogaming phenomenon. Today, Namco’s Pac-Man remains one of the most recognisable video game characters, transcending popular culture.

I won’t rehash the story, but I wrote about the development of Pac-Man a few years back – you can pick up that background by reading that article on this link.

And from that post, we can quickly summarise some context here:

The original game’s title subsequently became Puck Man in Japan on it’s release. Going from “Puck” to “Fuck”, would be very easy in Western markets with nothing more than a pen marker and a quick bit of arcade vandalism, and so Namco executives in America hastily chose the name Pac-Man to avoid such shenanigans.

Development of Pac-Man

Pac-Man of course was licenced by Midway in the USA and became a huge success, but what the name change meant, was that there was a brief period of time when Puck Man was a thing outside of Japan, before the decision to formally change the name of the game was made.

Which brings us onto the point of this post!

I recently picked up an interesting PCB from the clearance in Yorkshire that I was a part of a couple of months back. It appeared to be an original Namco PCB, and after a bit of investigation and discussion with other collectors here in the UK, we believed it to be a Puck Man board.

Having been pulled from a UK operator’s warehouse, the question arose of how it got here?

As we were about to leave the clearance, I took one final sweep in a particular corner of one of the rooms, which turned up not only three colour vector monitors (I was a popular man at that point) but also some artwork bezels and marquees leaning up against a wall, behind a shelving unit. And what should turn up, but these two pieces:

This added an important clue. Back home and after a bit of research, I was able to establish that these pieces came from a UK Puck Man cabinet.

Here is where it gets a bit murky. According to the website puckman.net:

This nice little upright was made by Bell Fruit MFG in the United Kingdom, it features a real Namco Japan Puckman board so it looks like it’s an approved license.

Puckman.net

Bell Fruit MFG was a well-known manufacturer of arcade cabinets back in the eighties and were a well-established, legitimate and above board company. Indeed they licenced several games over here, including Namco’s Galaxian – so from my perspective, there is little to suggest that they would release a bootleg/copy version of Puck Man.

Examining the PCB again, one thing that does stand out, is the use of daughter boards on the main PCB – something that you won’t find on an original Puck Man board.

These daughter cards replace custom chips that would normally be at those locations. There are two schools of thought here:

1. The daughter cards where used in place of the custom chips due to supply issues (as the game was so popular, the manufacturer of these chips couldn’t keep up with demand – indeed, if you look at a Midway Pac-Man PCB, these daughter cards are used.
2. Bootleggers were unable to copy the original custom chips, and so used these daughter boards instead.

What is common when you compare both PCBs side by side is the connector ribbon cables in the middle there – these are paper/card with wires inside. The PCB can be “cracked” in half and folded over on itself for use in a cocktail table where space is limited.

There are other similar markings on certain chips, and in every other respect, the PCBs are identical.

What doesn’t help, is that Namco didn’t mark these early PCB to make identification easy.

If you want to disappear down a rabbit hole, there are a couple of interesting threads on collector forums that discuss these PCBs. Sadly there’s no real conclusion made, but they make for interesting reading all the same:

Thread on UKVAC forums discussing Bell Fruit Puckman

Thread (that I started) on KLOV forums

So is my PCB original? This is the big question, but after discussing with Japanese collectors and some of the older collectors here in the UK, our consensus is the PCB is a Namco board, that was either populated by Bell Fruit here in the UK, or shipped with the daughter boards due to shortages of the custom chips.

Meanwhile, while the debate was raging on online, I wanted to see if the PCB worked – after replacing a missing RAM chip and building a custom adaptor to allow the PCB to be plugged into my Jamma cabinet, I got this on screen:

I was able to send the PCB off to my buddy Gavin to take a look at and he was able to get things running – but in doing so, he turned up a surprise!

So it seems that our UK operator converted the Puck Man board at some point, to run Ms Pac-Man – which would explain the additional wire hacks on the reverse of the board. So I asked Gavin to repair the PCB itself, and reburn the EPROMs to run the original Japanese Puck Man ROMs.

So a few hours later, we now had a working Puckman PCB running the original Japanese release of Puck Man, which of course pre-dates Midway’s release of Pac-Man!

Big thanks to my buddy Gavin for getting this thing back up and running again – he is a repair wizard!

Whilst we may never truly get to the bottom of the question of originality (even though all the indicators to my mind suggest the board is genuine), it remains an interesting piece of arcade history, and its something I’m really pleased to own in my collection. And actually what does it matter? Either way its a rare thing and something really cool to own.

One day perhaps, should I get enough time, I’d love to fashion up a replica Bell Fruit MFG ‘Puckman‘ cabinet – as I have all the custom parts to do it – I would just need to recreate the generic cabinet and drop in the PCB, bezel and marquee. Would be an interesting project!

If you want some more reading on the subject of Puck Man and Pac-Man, check out the incredible Pac-Man Dossier created by Jamey Pittman found here.

I’ll leave you with a cool video that looks at the artwork created for Puck Man. Its in Japanese, but you can use YouTube translate feature to see English subtitles.

Thanks for reading this week – if you have any further insight into Puck Man PCBs, do leave a comment below!

Until next time,

Tony