There's a Pac-Man battle royale coming to Steam

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Videogames have come a long way since Pac-Man. Now they've got hats.

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle originally released back in 2020 as a Stadia exclusive, and seemed to have died with Google's gaming platform. But you can't keep a good Pac-Man down. He's been chewing his way out of Stadia's corpse ever since. Renamed Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, the battle royale-inspired multiplayer version of the arcade maze game will be arriving on Steam in May.

In Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, 64 competing Pac-Mans are placed in 64 connected mazes, which they can travel between via the tunnels that normally loop you back to the other side of the screen. In those mazes you can, after consuming a power-up, cannibalize rival Pacs-Mans until you are the last Pac-Man standing.

Other power-ups let you freeze opponents, increase your speed, temporarily shield yourself from harm, and so on. In the traditional battle royale style, mazes vanish from the edge of the map over time, forcing players to tunnel into each other's homes to consume their flesh. Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle will continue the other grand tradition of battle royales by offering cosmetics so that you can give your Pac-Man a silly hat or a pair of glasses or whatever.

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs will be coming to Steam on May 8, with cross-platformer multiplayer so we can compete with our friends on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.