I have news from Mother: for a game series that pretty much peaked with its first instalment almost 40 years ago, Pac-Man somehow remains one of the most iconic video games characters of all time. Why? You can blame the iconic simplicity of the yellow fellow's design, the purity and brilliance of the original concept, and an early-80s marketing blitz which saw Pac-Man-branded products stacked high than Pac-Man himself after a power-pill binge.
Of course, success lures the jackals and the imitators, and Pac-Man might've had more imitators than any other character in gaming history. Here are but ten o'they things.
Yours in memorium,
Roly Pissman
Nevertheless, this 1982 release for the Atari 2600 did indeed attempt to reinterpret the tense, sci-fi horror as a pill-gobbling maze game, with the iconic xenomorphs standing in for Pac-Man's ghosts, and alien "eggs" replacing the dots. It wasn't entirely a rip-off of Pac-Man, mind. A bonus round managed to steal from Frogger as well.
See also: the Dragon 32 version of My Dinner With Andre.
Kaypro's machines were text-only, thus the player's character was depicted as a letter "C" - presumably standing for "cat", "chum", or "cervix".
Successfully do the plumbing, and you would be treated to the image of an attractive lady amid some "bubbly suds" - presumably to encourage the player to produce some "bubbly suds" of their very own...
Have you ever eaten food off the ground in a park? If it's something you fancy doing, here's some advice: avoid the sausages.
You see... they're actually dog poo.
This is the sort of game that, were they to release it today, would generate loads of opinion pieces written by the sort of person who wouldn't set foot in a church, but thinks it's an affront to their culture that nobody has released a game in which you have to collect copies of The Quran.
"Mhurrr mhurr... free speech blah blah...."
Also, the maze was far larger than the typical Pac-Man maze, and - oddly - the player's location was shown in a magnified square, making navigation particularly challenging. Perhaps sensing that basing a game around the consumption of bodily waste, it was subsequently rebranded to both Magneto Bugs and Bug Attack.