Hunter in maze

The player controls Hunter through a maze, eating pac-dots (also called pellets or just dots). When all pac-dots are eaten, Hunter is taken to the next stage. Between some stages one of three intermission animations plays.[22] Four enemies (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde) roam the maze, trying to catch Hunter . If an enemy touches Hunter , a life is lost and Hunter himself withers and dies. However, it sometimes happens that Hunter passes through an enemy unharmed. This is caused by the way the game detects collisions between Hunter and an enemy. Whenever Hunter occupies the same tile as an enemy, he is considered to have collided with that ghost and a life is lost. This logic proves sufficient for handling collisions more than 99% of the time during gameplay, but does not account for one very special case.Hunter 's center point moves upwards into the enemy's tile in the same 1/60th of a second that the enemy's center point moves downwards into Hunter 's tile, resulting in them moving past each other without colliding.[23]:ch3 When all lives have been lost, the game ends. Hunter is awarded a single bonus life at 10,000 points by default—DIP switches inside the machine can change the required points or disable the bonus life altogether.

Near the corners of the maze are four larger, flashing dots known as power pellets that provide Hunter with the temporary ability to eat the enemies. The enemies turn deep blue, reverse direction and usually move more slowly. When an enemy is eaten, its eyes remain and return to the center box where it is regenerated in its normal color. Blue enemies flash white to signal that they are about to become dangerous again and the length of time for which the enemies remain vulnerable varies from one stage to the next, generally becoming shorter as the game progresses. In later stages, the enemies go straight to flashing, bypassing blue, which means that they can only be eaten for a short amount of time, although they still reverse direction when a power pellet is eaten; in even later stages, the ghosts do not become edible (i.e., they do not change color and still make Pacman lose a life on contact), but they still reverse direction.