Interview with Bill Bastable

Howdy folks! ersatz_cats here. Recently, I traveled from cold, rainy Olympia, Washington, alllll the way to sunny Sarasota, Florida, where I had the immense honor and privilege to interview the original Pac-Man master himself, Bill Bastable.

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/145994579/

For those who aren’t familiar with Bastable, he’s the guy who was maxing out Pac-Man’s score counter years before those who wish to take credit for the game’s dominance today.

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/517304401/

Amidst all the lies and bogus scores being claimed in the wild west days of Pac-Man, Bastable was in the newspaper with contemporary reporting on his top score of 3,332,820. This score is important because, as Bill knew at the time and the world would later discover, this was the maximum score possible on a single play of the game – setting aside the glitched hidden dots on the final screen which at the time were generally considered out-of-bounds. 3,332,820 points is what you get when you eat every dot (61,312 of them), every power pellet (1,022 of them), every fruit (511 of them), and every available “blue time” ghost (272 of them), up to and including the left half of the broken split screen on board 256. (In other words, Bill Bastable is the player – or at least, one of the players – who Walter Day and Billy Mitchell knew about but chose to ignore when they declared Mitchell the “first” to do a perfect score on Pac-Man in 1999.)

Bastable achieved this score six times in the course of a few months. His achievements even caught the attention of Bally-Midway, the U.S. distributors of the game, who sent him a letter of congratulations. (Note that the letter does refer to one other player who had achieved the same score prior to Bill. The community has been unable to track down this other perfect score player.)

But Bill Bastable didn’t stop there! In 1986, he learned other players were venturing into the out-of-bounds area on the final screen, scooping up hidden dots to boost their scores just a little bit higher. So to meet the challenge, Bill acquired a Pac-Man cabinet for his home. He explored the split screen and identified all nine of the hidden, regenerating dots. Since the circuit board he acquired already had the “jumper” solder (a popular alteration that caused the game to play differently), Bill did a perfect score with the hidden dots on that “jumper” version first, before scraping off the solder to do a perfect score with the hidden dots on the regular version.

Naturally, he took a photo of his accomplishment, as anyone in his situation would. The game doesn’t track the millions digit, but you can see the displayed 333,360 of a full perfect score, immortalized in time. Even better, the photo was printed on photo paper dated September 1988. Some have chosen to quibble over this 1988 score given Bastable’s own acknowledgment that he used the arcade cabinet’s pause switch to freeze his game in progress – something we would not even know about had he not honestly volunteered that information. However, there was no scorekeeping organization forbidding this at the time, and no reason for him not to pause his game as he saw fit. Either way, Bill Bastable piloted a genuine original Pac-Man cabinet to a score of 3,333,360, all the way back in 1988.

When planning for this trip to Sarasota, I described Bastable to my non-gamer friends as “The J.D. Salinger of video games”, in the sense that he never does interviews. (And not like that other guy who constantly talks in interviews about how he “never does interviews”.) Bastable was featured in Dwayne Richard documentaries in 2012, then phoned into a podcast in 2017, and then… well, that’s basically it. Bill is also a hard person to get ahold of. He has no email address, nor even a modern computer or home Internet. He has a phone number, and that’s it. I was only put in touch with Bastable through my research for our 2021 investigative series on that other guy. (Check out “Dot Two” for more background on Bastable and other early Pac-Man pioneers.)

Although his dislike for interviews persists, the technologically unsavvy Bill needed help recording game play he wished to preserve, and his local friends were unwilling to dedicate the time and patience necessary for him to hit the achievements he was aiming for. And thus, we arrived at a deal: I would fly out to Sarasota, arrange the necessary equipment, and record and distribute whatever game play he wished to preserve, and in exchange, he offered to sit down and answer (most) any question I had, on camera. And I am happy to say, Mr. William Bastable is a man of his word. For two hours, we discussed his early perfect scores, other Pac-Man masters, other games, and his run-ins with Chris Ayra and Billy Mitchell. Additionally, we discussed the very exclusive club Bill has reached, being a dedicated gamer over the age of 60 (with most older gamers, even those from the early arcade days, still being in their 40s or 50s). For my part, I’m just happy to be playing a role in preserving this bit of gaming’s oral history.

While you’re here, check out Bastable’s very impressive “Super 44” Super Pac-Man patterns. While not “perfect” in the strictest sense (the prize points are not maximized, and some of the fractional blue time was skipped), these patterns represent optimal play through the game’s first 44 boards. And since the last 16 boards (29-44) repeat endlessly without a kill screen, these patterns allow an adept player to rack up a score limited only by their own marathon endurance:

See also Bastable’s impressive almost three-hour run demolishing Mr. Do’s Castle, to the tune of 3,256,660 points on factory settings. (With apologies to Bastable, when I published that video yesterday, I accidentally marked the score as a mere 1,256,660, shorting him two million points.) This game could be considered a companion to his score of 1,640,140 on tournament settings, recorded five years ago. However, Bastable was interested in recording a score on more generous factory settings, which gave him the chance to show off every board through number 160.

And of course, don’t forget to check out the two-hour interview itself: