Pac-Man clones

In video gaming, Pac-Man clones are unauthorized versions of Namco's popular maze chase arcade game Pac-Man. The combined sales of counterfeit arcade machines sold nearly as many units as the original Pac-Man, which had sold more than 300,000 machines.

Hangly-Man (a mis-transliteration of the Japanese pronunciation of hungry man (Japanese: ハングリーマン Hangurī Man)) was one of the most notable Pac-man clones, a variant of which was Caterpillar Pac-Man made in 1981 by Phi. In the latter, one plays as a caterpillar, and the ghosts are replaced by spiders. Another notable clone was New Puck-X, which used an altered design of the original board, but, otherwise, the gameplay and graphics were identical to the original game. There was also a clone titled Piranha where Pac-Man was replaced by a Piranha & the ghosts are replaced by squids. Also, there were no borders in the maze & the power-pellets were replaced with sea shells.

Lock 'n' Chase was developed and published by Data East in Japan in 1981, and was later published in North America by Taito. The game was later licensed to Mattel who produced the Intellivision and Atari 2600 home console versions in 1982 [1] [2] and an Apple II version in January 1983 [3]. Here, Pac-Man was replaced with a thief stealing coins from a bank vault. The ghosts were replaced with police, and the thief could temporarily block passages with doors.

...
Wikipedia