Professor Pac-man
Professor Pac-man
I didn’t know too much about the game, other than it was trivia based game with questions and answers. Reading klov, it says that the game had over 500 unique answers, which really isn’t a ton. Midway thought this was going to be the next big type of game, but it flopped immediately, and only 400 were ever made.
Not a type of game that appealed to me, Pac-man based or not, I didn’t figure that I would be doing artwork for this game. But Richard Ford asked me if I could redo the control panel for him, I believe he has two of the few that still remain. The second one needs the parts, and hence the artwork.
Double checking Professor Pac-man measurements
Took the Professor Pac control panel artwork tonight and did the measured adjustments on it. Of course I had to do some adjustments, my artwork seemed to be a little more short than the measurements when I scaled it down proportionately. I am guessing that next it should be printed out to scale, and laid over a current machine to make sure that it is pretty close to correct.
Hopefully Richard is able to print that off ok, even with margins, maybe at a local printer or something.
Professor Pac-man Control Panel Dimensions Diagram
Here it is, a simple diagram showing the dimensions of the Professor Pac-man Control Panel Overlay (CPO), the width, height, and other pertinent measurements to help you reproduce it if you need to.
Professor Pac-man control panel artwork dimensions
Got dimensions today for the actual Professor Pac-man control panel overlay. I am going to try to make a diagram at some point to demonstrate those estimations. For now, here they are listed out.
- Total Width – 23.0625 in
- Height – 11 in
- Distance btw pink border & edge on left & right sides – .5625 in
- Distance btw pink border & top edge of overlay – 2.3125 in
- Distance btw pink border & bottom edge of overlay – 2.25 in
Finished Professor Pac-man control panel vector artwork
Finished up the control panel overlay tonight. I took the font I chose, and pretty much used it with some small modifications. I turned all of the characters into outlines, and modified the letter” “s”, which seemed to be the most drastically different character. That, and the periods in the font were squares, and on the overlay they were circles. By repeating both of those characters I kept some uniformity.
I also redid the rounded pink borders, and wasn’t sure that they were a perfect match, but after redoing them twice, I thought they were very close. Here is a small exported image from Illustrator of what it looks like, with dotted circles of approximations of where the buttons would go.
Closest Professor Pac-man font = ITC Grizzly
In continuing to try to find the right font used in the Professor Pac-man control panel overlay instructions, today I found a font that looks like it could be very similar to the “ITC Grizzly”. It’s just called “Grizzly BT” and looks like it is an Adobe Postscript font, file names Grizzlyn.afm, .pfb, and .pfm.
I can’t seem to get the font to work on my font management software on Windows Vista Ultimate. I tried to set it up downstairs on XP, and it worked fine, it even came up in Illustrator as “ITC Grizzly”, so I know I have the right font. It appears to line up just fine with the text on the Professor Pac control panel, there will have to be some leading and kerning of course, and there is some small differences in different letters, like the “s”, but it will work as a great base, and save me a ton of time.
Professor Pac-man font identification
Took a look again tonight at the fonts that I discovered were possibilities for the text on the control panel. The first option that seemed to be the closest was “ITC Grizzly”. The font had some of the character characteristics, but I can’t tell if it is from the photo or not, but the fine points seemed to be a little more rounded. I can’t seem to find a version right now, I am going to check at work tomorrow and see if I have it there, otherwise I may just have to trace all the letters.
