The Indianapolis Star from Indianapolis, Indiana • Page 54

I E2 SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1999 THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR People "If Elvis is the king of rock roll, Pac-Man is the king of video games." Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association Miss America likes Lt. Gov. dered maze, the 20th anniversary game requires the use of multiple controls and at least some familiarity with the accompanying instruction book. Pac-Man himself has a new look, with facial features and body parts. It's almost enough to make you long for the old days, back when he was endearingly faceless and, for the most part, featureless just as creator Tohru Iwatani had originally envisioned him after staring at a pizza missing a single slice.

Thompson, though, says such sentiments might have become increasingly prevalent, anyway, since "Pac-Man is now the stuff of touching nostalgia." "It's been around long enough that an entire generation of people remember Pac-Man from when they were in their foot pajamas, playing Atari on the television," he says. "There are millions of people in America for whom their earliest memory is Pac-Man chomping on power pellets." sonality-free spaceships and paddles were otherwise the norm. Namco marketing director Mike Fischer says the new 3-D game was created by a team of designers who had grown up playing the original Pac-Man and, therefore, "had a desire to stay true to the original." He calls Pac-Man World 20th Anniversary "an homage to the original game a tribute and not a knockoff." Still, things are hardly the same Pac's, world. Complex edition Though it remains a family-friendly franchise (the charmingly innocent original in no way presaged the later trend toward violent imagery in video games), the anniversary edition is decidedly more complex than the original. Whereas the original was an elegantly simple game in which the central title character was controlled by a single joystick as he ate and ran through a blue-bor Pac-Man chomps its way from 1980 to the 3-D age It appears that Miss America Heather Renee French and Kentucky's Lt.

Gov. Steve Henry are an item. "We will see where the future goes with this, but I enjoy spending time with Steve and Heather Renee French talking to him on various issues," the former Miss Kentucky said in Thursday's Lexington Herald-Leader. Henry said, "We're very close friends," but declined to characterize their relationship further and said questions should be directed to French. Augusta Mayor Wendell R.

High introduced Henry as "someone close to Heather's heart" when BREAKUP Continued from Page 1 and extremely funny. He is raunchy, the rap goes, he is egotistical, he asks strippers on air to bare their breasts. But now he bared something else. "When we got married, I told her the most beautiful thing to me was that we would grow old together," he said. "I didn't think I would get this old." He laughed something that was not quite a laugh.

"We still love each other," he said. This is the saddest thing that has ever happened to me." Stern's marriage has been an inextricable part of his show and not just because of his frequent complaints about their sex life and Alison's occasional on-air rebuttals. His proclaimed fidelity to his wife has been the curious counterbalance to his leering public identity. To the extent he can get away with asking strippers to sit on his lap, it is because his listeners accept him as a loving husband and doting father of three daughters. Stern is well aware his visible devotion to his wife cuts him enor mous amounts of slack with the public.

His marriage has been a bracing anti-celebrity story: Boy meets girl at 19, becomes rich and famous, then decades later stays if PAC-MAN Continued from Page 1 He's an international icon, the most pervasive gaming character in pop culture. A charming, cherubic computerized chap celebrated in song (Pac-Man Fever), food (Pac-Man Cereal, Pac-Man Pasta), movies Wayne's World) and cartoons (The Pac-Man Show). There was even an arcade offshoot Ms. Pac-Man. Further proving Pac-Man transcends the boundaries of the gaming world, the term "Pac-Man defense" came into existence in the dog-eat-dot world of corporate takeovers, used to describe a maneuver in which a takeover target turns right around and attempts to gobble up the original bidder.

Says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association, an international group of culture-centric scholars and academics: "If Elvis is the king of rock 'n' roll, Pac-Man is the king of video games. You'd have a hard time getting any game to emerge again with that kind of cultural power." Pondering Pac-Man's place in the cultural pantheon, Thompson adds it was the perfect game at the perfect time, arriving, as it did in 1980, right along with the computer revolution that was just getting under way in the United States. Emerged like Elvis "We were at the dawn of a new era when Pac-Man came out," he says. "And Pac-Man emerged, much like Elvis did in the 1950s, as the first one to plant the flag of this new era into the soil of our consciousness. "It was the fuse that lit the video-game explosion, and people just jumped on it.

It was a lifestyle, not just a video game." One that spawned 430 officially licensed products and a slew of spinoffs, the latest of which is Pac-Man World 20th Anniversary, a Sony PlayStation game. The game is now in stores, about a year shy of the vaunted video game gobbler's 20th birthday. It was designed by Namco, the same Japanese company that made Pac-Man among the first characters to anchor an arcade game, when per iCARE G'R 'O 'llc The Pulse or Innovative Care Presents mmmLx in CORKY RICHMOND FROM WIRE REPORTS A year elder Actor Hamilton Camp is Movie director Claude Le- touch is 62. Rock singer Grace Slick is 60. 1 Songwriter Eddie Holland is 60.

ActorEdLauteris59. singer Otis Williams (The Temptations) is 58. Actor Henry Winkler is 54v I Musician Timothy B. '-t Schmit (The Eagles) is 52. Actor Harry Hamlin is 48.

Actor Charles Martin Smith is 46. Country singer T. Graham Brown is 45. Actor Kevin Pollak is 41. Rock singer Joey Belladonna (Anthrax) is 39.

Rock singer-musician Jerry DeBorg (Jesus Jones) is 36. Rock singer-musician Gavin Rossdale (Bush) is 32. Actress Nia Long is 29. Country singer Kassidy Os-bom (SHeDAISY) te 23. Divorcing I Stern faces career fix By Paul Brownfield LOS ANGELES TIMES r.

There were no strippers Monday on The Howard Stem Show, no lesbian porno stars or alcoholic dwarfs or celebrities' being ambushed by a stutterer. There was just the radio show's normally Id-driven host, talking in: a heartfelt way about why he and Alison, his wife of 21 years, had decided to separate. To be sure, Stern will find new comedy in the prospect of being- available again at 45, no longer rei. treating to his family in Long Is- land but to a $6 million condominium on the Upper West Side of New York City. But with his marriageon the rocks, the context of his comedy nevertheless changes.

"He told me once that if he ever left Alison, his mother would take Alison's side," Judith Regan, who edited Stem's two books, Private Parts and Miss America, said in a 1997 New Yorker profile on radio star. "He'd also lose his entire persona. He'd no longer be one of us. He'd become one of them. He'd be every other celebrity who says sanctimonious things and acts like' a jerk." Through countless projects on his way to building a media em-pire, Stern has exploited the comic, tension between his id and his superego, between what he would like to do if given half the chance and the way his moral compass always kicks in.

This was the dominant theme of his 1997 film, Pri vate Parts, in which Stem's conscience and libido are at con-'" stant loggerheads with the Conscience always winning out. "Howard Stem's provocative and socially Incorrect act in which he dazzles everybody with his high-wire bad-boy act Is counterbal-1 anced by the fact that most people believe he is a stable, dedicated, decent family man," said Michael rn Harrison, editor of Talkers, an Industry trade magazine. "My fear is his whole persona will change when people realize that maybe It's not an act." On Monday, Stem sought to downplay the notion he will now date every stripper who passes through his studio. Some Stem listeners, including comedian David Brenner, a guest on Stem's radio show over the years, wondered if the whole thing was a hoax for ratings, perhaps. Stem's radio audience has been widely estimated at 17 million.

But he has yet to find similar accept-" ance on TV, a medium less suited to his fantasy-based brand of comedy. COMPILED BY he accompanied her a few weeks ago to her hometown of Maysville. That's a pretty good description of where our relationship is right now," French said. The two met about two years ago, but only in the past year have they gotten to know each other well, Henry said. Henry is a 46-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Louisville who has never been married.

French is 24. Laryngitis forces Williams to cancel holiday shows Laryngitis is forcing Andy Williams to cancel nearly a month of his popular Christmas shows in Branson, for the first time in his 63-year career. Williams, 71, is on strict orders from his doctor to refrain from talking or singing. About 85,000 tickets had been sold for his Branson Christmas shows in November. Father-daughter duo Pat and Debby Boone will fill in.

Williams hopes to be back on stage the first week in December. with her. Inevitably, there will be speculation as to whether Stern really Is the family man he claimed to be. But if the essence of the separation is a difference of life opinion, the questions become more universal. If two people really love each other, how far should they go to accommodate their mates? What can we change about ourselves? What qualities are too entwined in our essential character? Does love conquer all, or does our psychology and nature, in the end, trump everything else? The answers are necessarily personal.

But the public face Stern put on his private sadness offered a universal lesson on a quality not normally associated with him: class. He expressed admiration for his wife, and characterized her wishes as perfectly reasonable. He expressed regret at the turn life had taken. He worried about the effect on his daughters, ages 16, 12 and 6, and vowed to do his best to minimize their pain and Alison's. Being Howard Stern, of course, he said more.

"What's your cup size?" he inquired of a weeping caller. "Maybe I could console you." It was real-life radio at its most fascinating. I wish for Stern's sake he could have told penis jokes instead. STANDARDS FOR JUDGING ESSAYS The judgefs) shall read and evaluate each essay properly sub-milled with a valid entry fee. Each essay shall be judged on the basis of style, content, originality, and desire.

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6th at Sacramento Bee Hnspired by a pizza missing one slice, Japanese designer Tohru Iwatani in the late "70s conceptualized what became the most popular video game icon ever a circular yellow character with a diet of dots and fruits. He gave it a name that translates to "Eat Man." Here's a look at how the game has gone. 1980: Namco and the Bally Midway Manufacturing Co. introduce an arcade game across America. Originally called Puck-Man, its name is quickly changed when it's discovered that a minor amount of adolescent tinkering can convert it into something seriously vulgar.

It's an instant hit by any name, selling about 100,000 coin-operated machines in its first year. 1981: Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia release Pac-Man Fever, a parody of Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch Fever. It reaches No. 9 on the Billboard pop singles chart and achieves gold-selling status. Ms.

Pac-Man becomes the first of many EVENTS INCLUDE: 5K Women's Only Run 5 Mile Coed Run 5K Competitive Walk 5K Family Fun RunWalk Kiddie Romp StarStrides I Jx Benefitting Local Women's Charities Saturday, Nov. 13 Run the distance and raise money for local women's charities in the Star Strides prior to the opening of the 1999 Women's Expo. Pac-Man spinoffs to enter arcades. Pac-Man costumes are a huge hit on Halloween. Atari rush-releases the first home version of Pac-Man for its 2600 system.

1982: Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man Show cartoon is a Saturday morning hit on ABC. Pac-Man memorabilia floods the market. Items include Pac-Man toilet seats, whoopee cushions and air fresheners. 1983: Pac-Man makes a comic computer-screen cameo in National Lampoon's Vacation. Game spinoffs include Junior Pac-Man.

1984: Pac-Man Fever is dying down as is the golden age of arcade games. 1990: Namco issues a GameBoy version of Pac-Man. 1996: Namco again releases the arcade version of Pac-Man, sparking a minor revival of Pac-Mania. 1999: A year before Pac-Man's actual 20th anniversary, Namco's Pac-Man World 20th Anniversary is released, updating the power-pellet-eater for the 3-D home-gaming age. HONORARY STARTER America's Top Woman Race Car Lyn St.

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