'Pac-Man' Reality TV Show In The Works

If you've ever wanted to eat a bunch of dots while running through a maze, you may soon have your chance. Merv Griffin Entertainment, the company behind Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, has teamed with Namco Bandai Games America to develop a reality game show based on the popular video game Pac-Man. Incidentally, did you know the original name for Pac-Man was Puck-Man? Read more after the jump.

Roy Bank, Merv's head of Television described the show to Deadline as follows:

A big, crazy Wipeout-type event with a lot of energy. The idea we have is to take what Pac-Man is and bring it to life, to bring what is essentially the world's biggest game of tag to television.

This won't be Pac-Man's first trip to television. He actually did make it to TV once before, in 1982 and 1983 as an animated cartoon series. Here's what the opening of the show looked like.

The way that Bank describes the game as "the world's biggest game of tag" is interesting. I never quite thought of Pac-Man as tag, because in Pac-Man, when you get tagged, you're not it, you're dead. Still you can begin to formulate what they show will look like in your head, can't you? A huge maze, people running around trying to collect as many dots as possible while other people chase them around. It's kind of like an immunity challenge on Survivor.

But it seems like a bright, boisterous show of people running around wouldn't need to be branded as Pac-Man. In fact, it's almost unnecessarily confusing because Pac-Man is obviously not as popular as it once was (it's been around for 30 years as of last year) and even people who do know it know of him as a consumer. So unless the contestants are dressed in yellow and eating their points, I'm not sure what the connection to Pac-Man will be.

Also, there's no word if Billy Mitchell will appear on the show to recreate his legendary perfect game of Pac-Man.

What do you think of this idea, can it work?

UPDATE: As per the suggestion of commenter Abutta05, here's an example of what live Pac-Man could look like from Broken Lizard's Club Dread. It's NSFW so be aware.