One Round of Ms. Pac-Man

Ground Kontrol
Old Town
Downtown Portland, Oregon
Saturday, June 29, 2026 | 12pm

There are dozens of arcade cabinets at Ground Kontrol, each representing a different chapter in the history of video games.

Donkey Kong. Space Invaders. Mario Bros. Tetris. Frogger.

Their illuminated marquees glow against the dark interior, while animated pixel art along the walls and blue-lit hallways briefly make the space feel as though it belongs to another world.

I grew up in the ’90s playing arcade games at pizza restaurants, but visiting an arcade dedicated almost entirely to classic cabinets was a different experience.

Of all the cabinets in the room, one drew me in.

Ms. Pac-Man.

After loading the minimum $10 onto a blue game card, I wandered through the arcade without any particular destination.

There was no shortage of choices.

The cabinet stood quietly among dozens of others, its bright yellow trim and glowing marquee immediately recognizable. The familiar maze waited on the screen. Instead of dropping a quarter into the coin slot, I tapped the game card against the reader. A small modern gesture awakened a decades-old game.

For the next few minutes, nothing else really mattered.

The objective remained as simple as it had always been: navigate the maze, collect the dots, avoid the ghosts.

I scored a little over 7,000 points. I never made it beyond the first act. That wasn’t disappointing.

In fact, it seemed beside the point.

As someone whose childhood belonged more to the Super Nintendo, SEGA Genesis, and eventually the Nintendo 64 than to the golden age of arcades, playing a Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet wasn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It was an opportunity to experience a piece of gaming history in the form it was meant to be played.

What stayed with me wasn’t the score, but the realization that more than four decades after Ms. Pac-Man first appeared in arcades, the experience still asked exactly the same thing of every player. There were no updates to download, no online rankings to chase, no complicated tutorial to complete. Just a joystick, quick decisions, and the hope of surviving one more turn around the maze.

In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and digital convenience, there was something refreshing about a game whose challenge had remained fundamentally unchanged.

Standing there, it occurred to me that some cultural artifacts are preserved behind glass. Others remain alive because people continue to use them as they were originally intended.

For a few minutes, Ms. Pac-Man wasn’t a piece of gaming history.

It was simply a game.