Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague

The platform computer game Pac-Man was invented by Mr. Toru Iwatani for the Namco company and was first introduced in Japan in 1980. It is noteworthy that arcade machines appeared in Prague in the same years. "Maringotkas" stood mostly on the periphery. I remember them somewhere around Pankrác.

The principle of Pek-men was that after throwing coins, you turn into a yellow head with open mouth and you can move around the labyrinth and eating dots. There are also dangerous monsters in the maze, actually four colorful ghosts. They usually want to catch you and eat you. At the beginning of the game, there is only one red ghost, the others are locked in a yard in the middle of the screen. Gradually they all get in the maze and start chasing you from all sides. When a ghost grabs you, you lose one of three lives and can start over as long as you have some life left. The dots you ate disappeared. To defend against ghosts, there are four larger dots in each level that you can eat. The ghosts will then turn blue for a while and you can chase them for a change, maybe even eat them. After eating the ghost his eyes remain, which return to the center of the maze where the ghost is regenerated.

Before that, there were only those simple Ping games in Prague. There you shot at falling monsters, which instead try to hit and kill you. The aforementioned maringotkas surrounded the sound of arcade machines. Mozart K had this song. It was composed by Oldřich Janota. I played the recorded sounds of those machines from the cassette player and slid the glass on the mandolin, Emil Pospíšil slid the neck of the electric guitar, Jan Štolba played the saxophone. Maybe Mirek Kodym sometime played the congo. It's already 45 years ago. Maybe it was just a dream