36. K.C. Munchkin!

(Odyssey/Videopac, Ed Averett, 1981)
Look at this game's title. k.c. munchkin... K.C. MUNCHKIN!!
Surely you're sold already? but if not, here's some more info. Way back when, Pac-Man ruled the videogame roost but had yet to be ported to home consoles. Back then there was very little in the way of copyright law in the wacky world of gaming and many arcade classics were shamelessly ripped off by small companies and rush released to the various home consoles of the time. K.C. Munchkin! changed all that.

Munchkin was a Pac-Man clone with a few cool differences and even a maze editor. Atari had the rights to produce the first home version of "Pac-Man" itself, so when they saw a game so incredibly similar to what they thought was going to be their cash cow, they sued the pants of Phillips and the furry Pac-Man wannabe found himself in the dock, like a common smack dealer. It took several months and two judges, but Atari won out and production was stopped on poor old K.C (though in the meantime, the game had made a lot of money and been quite popular amongst those eager for home Pac-Man thrills)

The awesome irony lay in the fact that when Atari finally got their Pac-Man unleashed on the home market, the game SUCKED BALLS. A terrible port of the arcade, full of graphical glitches and bearing very little resemblance to the original. Atari's Pac-Man sold on name alone and in that amusing twist that you only get with gaming, most of the unlicensed clones, Munchkin included, were far more playable and interesting games (and had far more terrifying covers)

So K.C. Munchkin! is the little sprite that couldn't, but Munchkin is a game that set a legal precedence in what was acceptable when creating a program that was similar to an already successful franchise. Whilst this rip-off tradition happens to this day, especially with Nintendo DS shovelware, the difference is that those games usually pale in comparison to the original, whereas K.C. Munchkin! was superior to the home version of the game it ripped off. FAR superior.

Have you played Atari today?
If it's Pac-Man, then fuck no.