Namco-owned videogame character Pac-Man announced Monday that he would soon take his craving for dots to the World Wide Web. Panic erupted among members of the web community within seconds of his announcement, fueled by speculation in chat rooms and on message boards.
Gary Montgomery, systems administrator for a large web-server, warned that Pac-Man's threat should not be ignored. "This is no joke. He's legless, yes, but he rolls fast and his hunger is nearly limitless."
Computer-gaming insiders speculate that the planned rampage is not entirely unmotivated. Reports have been circulating for some time that older videogame characters, such as QBert, Frogger, and the Burger Time chef, resent their forced retirement in favor of a new breed of more life-like combat and pistol games.
Pac-Man will neither confirm nor deny such rumors. "Oh sure, I sort of faded from the radar somewhere in the mid-80s," he said. "So did Mr. T for that matter. But I've had a few blips since then, like a 3-D version, and now it's my twentieth anniversary so Game-Boy is coming out with a tribute to the original arcade game, in full-color."
Mr. T resented Pac-Man's implication that he was a has-been. "I pity Pac-Man, I really do," he said, before throwing a bill-collector from his AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter.
Many insiders have attributed Pac-Man's discontent to arguments with Ms. Pac-Man. "Since our divorce we haven't spoken except once I called her at 3am and just kept saying, 'Blinky is stinky' over and over until she hung up."
Perhaps the last word goes to Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani, who claims his baby is just doing what comes naturally to a little yellow dot-gobbler in a dot-com world.
"He hasn't been educated to discern between good and evil. If some one tells him guns are evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat guns. But he would most probably eat any gun, even the pistols of policemen who need them," is a famous Iwatani quote, which could be considered singularly prescient in light of recent events.
Whatever the reason, FBI spokesperson Susan Westerly has declared Pac-Man Public Enemy Number One. She descried what she termed his, "terrorist rhetoric and the potential damage," he could wreak on the international business and scientific communities. As of this writing, a bounty was being set to encourage, "the Monster Ghosts, Inky, Blinky, Stinky and Clyde, to not just reset the rack and send Pac-Man back to the middle [of it], but this time [to] permanently decommission him."
Members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, who recently released a batch of new dot-suffixes, worried that the chaos a Pac-Binge might cause could send them back to Level One with no Power Capsule or Fruit Target. "Investors just paid us $50,000 a pop for the new endings .biz, .pro, .name, etc," said ICANN spokesperson Lindsey Michaels. "Where will the dots land when they fall? Only Pac-Man can answer that."
"So can I," said Mr. T when told of Michaels' comments. "On yo' head!" He added, "That yellow-belly just better not come munching his face my way."
Speaking from an undisclosed location in virtual reality, Pac-Man said he understood and even sympathized with such views of his demented behavior. "Look," he said. "This is who I am. I've finally learned to just accept myself as a dot-devouring machine. I start salivating every time I read about a new Internet startup. I can't stop myself, as much as I might want my children to live in a world of improved communications and accelerated technological advances."
Despite the more vocal fears of businesses and everyday web-users, the hardest hit may be web-speculators, those entrepreneurs who've hoarded web addresses in hopes of selling them to late-comers at inflated prices.
"This could really hurt me," said Pete Sanfro, a Blockbuster Video clerk who buys web addresses in his spare time. "If Pac-Man eats up those dots like he said, users would be unable to reach their destination and my investment would be as worthless as a public-service video about the benefits of adding more egg whites to your diet."
Still, some experts say so-called "Pac-Man fever" boils down to hype used to sell newspapers to a technology-illiterate public. Computer Science Professor James McCormick, MIT, said such fears show a fundamental lack of computer-savvy on the part of the web-community. "The reality is that the dots in dot-com names are virtual dots. They merely represent in luminous pixels what is encoded in the data stream your computer receives from its server. At the most, Pac-Man could stymie individual users. There's no way he could affect more than a few people, not at his typical speed of one video-game screen per six seconds."
The Monster Ghosts could not be reached for comment.