Ms. Pac-Man is being written-out of Pac-Man history

pcgamer.com:

Due to an ongoing dispute over the rights to the character, Ms. Pac-Man has been removed from a re-release of Pac-Land—and replaced, in what looks like a permanent switch, with a new character called Pac-Mom. The last time we saw Ms Pac-Man in a re-release was 2014's Pac-Man Museum. Since then, Bandai-Namco has been in legal dispute with a company called AtGames.

This story needs considerable context, because what lies behind the Ms. Pac-Man game, the sequel to Pac-Man, is an unusual origin. The original Pac-Man arcade cabinet was released in 1980 and became the biggest smash-hit around, which of course led to clamour for a sequel as well as bringing it to the attention of what you might call early modders.

Essentially, the early arcade industry had an inventory problem: if a game sucked or didn't take off, you had a piece of bulky, heavy computer hardware worth thousands of dollars sitting around useless. Thus, both arcade developers and thirdparties produced conversion kits: hey presto, you've got a 'new' game by re-wiring the circuitry of the old one.

With Pac-Man, of course, the problem wasn't lack of sales: it was the lack of a sequel. Thus the General Computer Corporation, a company that made conversion kits for arcade cabinets, began developing what was called an 'enhancement' for the Pac-Man machine that was initially going to be called Crazy Otto.

Thanks to a lawsuit with Atari, during development GCC was barred from selling their conversion kits without permission from the original manufacturers. Thus, it approached Midway (Namco's US distributor). Midway saw gold, and the sequel it was desperate for. It bought the rights to Crazy Otto, and Namco worked to polish it up it for release as a Pac-Man game.