Pac-Man has a new wife, thanks to Ms. Pac-Man drama

polygon.com:

Quick, what’s Ms. Pac-Man look like? You definitely pictured the red bow, maybe also the go-go boots. Well, that version of Ms. Pac-Man, steadily disappearing thanks to a byzantine dispute involving Bandai Namco and AtGames, has been altered in a new release of Pac-Land launching today — and presumably in next month’s release of Pac-Man Museum Plus, a retro compilation which also houses Pac-Land.

Graphic artist Nicholas Caballero, of Paraguay, noted on Twitter Wednesday that the anthropomorphic Ms. Pac-Man appearing in 1984’s Pac-Land is instead what Bandai Namco calls Pac-Mom: She wears a pink hat, gloves, and heels instead of a red bow, orange gloves, and red boots. Baby Pac has been palette-swapped, for good measure, replacing her bow with a flower and removing her pacifier.

so apparently I found out that the Arcade Archives release of Pac-Land that comes out tomorrow was modified to replace Ms. Pac-Man (as well as Baby Pac) to have the new Pac-Mom character from Pac-Man Museum +. look at what you did to us AtGames pic.twitter.com/gEDNpXGMfV

So, what gives? Well, return with us to 2019, when Bandai Namco sued AtGames, the makers of throwback mini-consoles and arcade cabinets, whose work on a 2016 Genesis/Mega Drive for Sega didn’t win them any friends. Among other things, Bandai Namco alleged that AtGames had interfered in the publisher’s negotiations with Ms. Pac-Man’s original creators — a group of seven MIT classmates calling themselves General Computer Corporation — to buy out their royalty rights.

Lo and behold, AtGames itself ended up buying that royalty interest, meaning that, going forward, if Bandai Namco released anything with Ms. Pac-Man (or Baby Pac) in it, it would owe residuals to AtGames, the people