Reality TV Gets Pac-Man Fever

Well, this makes me a little sadder that we won't be seeing any new episodes of Mad Men or The Walking Dead for awhile.  Deadline is reporting that Merv Griffin Entertainment has joined forces with Namco Bandai Games America to develop a Wipeout-style show based on Pac-Man, the massively popular video game from the 1980s.  It's currently being shopped around to the networks now.

As video game afficianados know, Pac-Man has ventured out of the arcade before:  in 1982 he starred in his own animated series on ABC and inspired the hit single "Pac-Man Fever," which not only reached the #9 spot on Billboard's Hot 100, it was also performed during an assembly at my elementary school (for the record, not by me).

Now, I haven't played Pac-Man in awhile, but I do recall that the gist of it was that you spent the whole game racing around a maze being chased by ghosts.  Once Pac-Man had eaten all the little pellets in the maze, you moved onto the next maze, where you did...the same thing.  This repeated until you either ran out of quarters or your mom made you turn off the Atari. 

I'm not quite sure what the point is of watching other people play Pac-Man instead of getting to play it yourself (which is much more fun), but I suppose there's some sort of twisted joy to watching some jackass run around a life-size maze being chased around by whatever ghosts and obstacles that only reality TV can provide.  Certainly works for Wipeout.