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Pac-Man Fever Is the Weirdest Concept Album About Video Games You’ll Ever Hear

Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia’s music tribute to 80s video games is a creepy homage with guitar solos about the Golden Age of the arcades.

We can only guess that, one day in the early 80s, Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia talked about how they were impressed with the video game fad they were hearing about on the TV. Pac-Man was swallowing quarters as fast as he was dealing with stunned ghosts across the arcades in the US and, as two good and enthused jingle makers from Atlanta, the musicians wanted to get into that sweet gaming money that was rolling around. They decided to whip up a song about how crazy it was to play Pac-Man.

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They came up with "Pac-Man Fever," a weird and overly excited song about going quite literally insane from the desire of playing with the yellow puck dude from Namco.

Right after releasing the single through a local label, the duo got picked by CBS to make a full album of more jingled-up homages of other major game titles of the arcades. And that's how the silliest representation of 80s gaming culture came to be.

Today, Buckner and Garcia's music tribute to games is still considered one of the freakiest representations of the arcade scene from that time.

Each of the tracks in the Pac-Man Fever album tells the story of a classic arcade game. Even though it all sounds so artificial, it really encapsulates how the mainstream audience perceived gaming culture. So let's listen through the weirdness of this album in a careless effort to find a meaning behind these songs.

"Pac-Man Fever"

This is an arcade anthem, but that's all there is, which is kind of sad. I feel sorry for the guy. He really wants to play Pac-Man. I get it—it's a classic. But then he says, "All my money is gone, so I'll be back tomorrow night" at one point, and it just struck me.

This is a super-happy-feverish track over some guy singing as if he was boasting about his serious game addiction during an ad in a Saturday morning cartoon show from the 80s. And he then just finishes the song explicitly saying how he completely lost his shit over Pac-Man. Over Pac-Man, man.

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"Froggy's Lament"

You hear those arcade effects in the beginning of every track? Neither Buckner nor Garcia could sample those from the game's motherboard, so everything was recorded in local arcades, presumably shushing the folks who just wanted to get their game on. Too bad most of these samples were horribly mixed into the rest of the songs, so apparently not even they gave a damn if the sound bites matched their own creations. They had priorities, apparently.

One of these priorities was probably creating the most lethargic voice anyone ever imagined the frog from Frogger could have. He straight up sounds like your old uncle Bob who recently had to cut the smokes and just started having some salad for dinner instead of a heart attack at 55. This frog honestly sounds like he secretly enjoys barely getting hit by trucks and cars over and over and over, in an endless road-traversing journey to nowhere. Yeah, he's lamenting.

"Ode To A Centipede"

Not really sure how a surrealist centipede inspired Buckner and Garcia to compose a horrible Flash Gordon theme rip off, but coupled with Jerry's flamboyant catcalling at the insect that the game draws its name from, this whole thing is just too weird to handle. The totally misplaced 80s guitar solo rocks as much as it can for a half a minute there, but it just can't topple the creepy lyrics. Is he trying to seduce this thing? I don't know.

"Do The Donkey Kong"

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This track was the second single released by CBS in its continued illusion that this music could have prolonged commercial success. However, it flopped immensely compared to the first single, definitely ending this ordeal before it got too ugly, I guess. And I have no idea what "Do the Donkey Kong" means at all. Should I kidnap some girl and throw barrels at mustachioed men who try to do the right thing? Do they even know what that meant?

"Hyperspace"

Here they describe in detail how do get to play Asteroids with just a couple of verses, and then said screw it and peppered the irritating sounds of the game throughout the song with no perceivable pattern. So this really is the most excited and practical, but then very annoying gaming manual ever. How many traditional manuals do you know that have a rushed guitar solo right in the middle of it?

"The Defender, Mousetrap, and Goin' Berzerk"

From here to the end of the album, you can pretty much say that they stopped giving a damn about how literal their lyrics would be. Out with the soft analogies and in with straight explanations about how you play the game. No half-assed excuses to cash in on the fame of video games. They were just spilling out the game as they saw it. Who cares about Defender, Mouse Trap and Berzerk, the three games theses tracks were supposed to cover, if they could not even come up with creative names for these last tunes?