So when they arrived yesterday afternoon we gave them colouring sheets and served them Discos (circular crisps / potato chips that resembled, we reassured them, the dots that Pac-Man is so fond of eating). I consider myself to be down with the kids, to a certain extent, but you’re better safe than sorry. We only have these ideas at the last minute, and I’m not paying extortionate express delivery rates for something I’m only going to use once.)Įmily even managed to construct a rudimentary path for the giant Pac-plate to follow across the table.īut what of this strange yellow beast? Our guests knew him, more or less, but did they really know him? Did they know, for example, that the reason you can make a Pac-Man by removing a slice from an oven pizza is because that’s where Toru Iwatani supposedly got the idea for the design (even though he later admitted that this was only half-true)? Do they know that the game was originally titled Puck Man, but was changed after too many cabinets were vandalised by American teenagers who changed the P’s into F’s? Have I now shot myself in the foot by telling Joshua this, even though I’ve sworn him to secrecy? (And yes, we know you can probably get ghost-shaped cookie cutters on Amazon. I promised Em I’d give the biscuits their own photo, because she spent ages cutting out the ghosts, which is why there are only six. The best part about this is that the circle-with-a-missing-wedge works with almost anything, as you’ll see below. The dots were an afterthought but really they’re there because she didn’t want to mar the surface of the cake. Which is fair enough. This was one of the first things to appear.Įmily decided to do the mouth black, “because it makes more of a contrast”. “Because then I can do themed food.”Īnd so we did. “Why don’t we do the whole party with a Pac-Man theme?” she suggested. It was Emily, as usual, who had the answer. Because what the hell do you do at a retro games party? Serve up long strips of icing that resemble the pixels from Pong? Have a Space Invaders flap-the-fish? Build a Q-Bert pyramid out of the myriad cardboard boxes we have stacked in the garage? These words came back to haunt us earlier this year when Thomas said he wanted a Pac-Man cake and I suggested a retro games party. Some years ago, I used this in a creative writing seminar I was facilitating on my aborted teacher training course as an indicator that if you have too broad a focus, the quality of your work will suffer. One of my favourite Peanuts cartoons goes thus: Linus has been tasked with every teacher’s fallback favourite, a two-page theme on “What I did on my summer holidays”. After consulting Lucy, he is able to produce a piece of work that reads “This summer, I read comic books and watched TV”, before pulling a despairing, disgruntled face as only Linus can.
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