While on the subject of Pacman, several months ago there was a posting on Slashdot games about a Japanese programmer who re-created Pacman entirely in an Excel spreadsheet. Upon reading the story I was both amazed and curious, so I downloaded the zip file from the site linked-to in the story. And it really was Pacman, right down to the cut scenes between levels! An excel-ent job, if I may say so. =)

Since then, the links don't seem to work anymore, but I still have the zip file if anyone is interested in checking it out. I'm not sure if this is was what Dan Bricklin had in mind for the purpose of a spreadsheet when he and his friend Bob Frankston first created VisiCalc back in 1979, but it's still very cool! It is a testament to just how far personal computers have progressed in such a short period of time. The PCs of those days would never have been able to handle the processing power required for all the cell manipulations in the Pacellman spreadsheet. Click.