User Feature: Down Home Gamin': On the Trail of the Pac-Man

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Down Home Gamin': On the Trail of the Pac-Man

On 08/19/2025 at 08:40 PM by SanAndreas

The early 1980s were awash in dot-eating maze games, thanks to the popularity of Pac-Man. Most of these games differed largely in cosmetic aspects. But a few developers did manage to stand out from the pack with unique twists.

Anteater (Tago Electronics, 1983, arcade) was one such developer, where the anteater's tongue left a trail in the maze of tunnels that could be attacked by ants. A year later, Sierra On-Line followed suit with Oils Well, a petroleum-themed version where the Pac-Man figure was a drill bit trailing a pipeline that was under attack by gremlins.

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Comments

Cary Woodham

08/20/2025 at 08:02 AM

I had never seen Anteater in an arcade nor heard of it until I played it on MAME in college!

SanAndreas

08/23/2025 at 09:08 AM

Same here. I didn't know that was where Oils Well had originated until I was an adult.

daftman

08/20/2025 at 10:23 PM

I have not heard of either of these games but that is an interesting twist on Pac-Man! I do like the look of the oil one a little more.

SanAndreas

08/23/2025 at 09:06 AM

Oils Well is faster and smoother than Anteater. Despite the fact that it was technically the "clone," it was far better known in its day than Anteater, which was somewhat rare.

KnightDriver

08/22/2025 at 09:39 AM

I read that Anteater was made for the 2600 but not published. Maybe Atari 50 will get it somehow from Mattel.

I read also that Oils Well was ported to C64 as Oils Well: Pipeline Run. I wonder if it's on my C64 mini console I got last year. I'll have to break that out again next month when I do 80s stuff.

Neat games! I like Anteater especially.

SanAndreas

08/23/2025 at 09:05 AM

Actually, the latest version of Atari 50 does include that system's port of Anteater. It's called Ant-Bear.

Oils Well was on the C64. If it's not built into the C54 mini, can games be added to that? I know they can be added to the Atari 400 Mini.

The guy that wrote Anteater in the arcades also wrote an Atari 8-bit home version of the game, called Aardy the Aardvark.

KnightDriver

08/23/2025 at 09:34 AM

Oh great. I'll have to try Ant-Bear then.

Doesn't look like Oils Well is on the C64 Mini but there is a firmware update you can get to add games to the system. I'll probably not go that far though. At least I can play Ant-Bear though.