Week 52: Gold record

The final item for 52 Weeks of Pac-Man Fever is Jerry Buckner's "Pac-Man Fever" gold record. As discussed before, the single went gold in March 1982. Back then, that meant selling 1,000,000 copies. (Today, only 500,000 is required.)

Apart from these clippings from Radio & Records, I could not find a photo of the gold record awards. (Yes, the album went gold too.)

From Radio & Records, 16 Apr 1982

From Radio & Records, 2 July 1982

But here are photos of Buckner's gold single award! He was kind enough to take some for me when I asked him.

While I haven't seen photos of the actual, RIAA-issued gold records much, there have been a couple related oddities to pop up online. First is this gold record award apparently for Columbia Records president Al Teller. It can be yours for just $600.

There's also this award commemorating 1,000,000 copies of the Pac-Man Fever album. It was apparently presented to Shulman Record Co. by Listening Booth, a now defunct chain of record stores. This is odd, because even Buckner believes the album only sold around 900,000 copies.

Aside (courtesy Wikipedia): Until it got complicated in the digital age, albums required 500k copies for gold and 1,000,000 for platinum.

Originally singles required 1,000,000 copies for gold and 2,000,000 for platinum. Starting January 1, 1989, those numbers were halved.

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This is not actually the end of the 52 Weeks of Pac-Man Fever project! I had planned to end with something special for a grand finale, but it turns out just doing the project took up too much time to do that. So look for that by the album's 41st anniversary in January.

Also, due to me pausing them while looking for files for a particular one, there's still one more Wednesday cover coming this Wednesday. And I missed the events of March 20, 1982, which I'll have to write an entry for.

Finally, my followers over on Twitter have voted to keep Off-Topic Tuesday going. I don't, however, plan to keep cross-posting those to this blog. But look for those other entries I mentioned in the near future.

Halfway Point

This week marks the halfway point of the "52 Weeks of Pac-Man Fever" project. It's hard to believe we're already halfway there, but we are. I honestly wasn't sure when I started if I'd actually be able to come up with 52 items. And at that point I had several items listed individually that I'm now starting to list as groups so I can squeeze them all in!

So where are we? Well, as of this time in 1982, we've seen the "Pac-Man Fever" single peak and start falling on all the American charts. On RPM's 50 Singles chart in Canada, the single has just hit its peak. The album is still climbing the American album charts. The single has also gone gold (shipped 1 million copies), but the album has not yet gone gold (shipped 500,000 copies).

Coming up, besides the album peaking on the charts, we'll look at some of the ways Jerry Buckner has kept the Pac-Man Fever flame burning in May. Then we have the release of the second single from the album, "Do the Donkey Kong", which we'll celebrate with Donkey Kong Month in June. Beyond that is the re-recording and re-release of the album in 1999, and the subsequent merchandise Buckner & Garcia created.

I do have a special plan to wrap up the end of this project, so just because the history starts winding down, don't think that it's over! In the meantime, please share the tweets or blog entries with any friends you think might be interested.

Song, album, and video game name style conventions

 In case you haven't figured it out, here are the style conventions of the blog.

• "Pac-Man Fever" (in quotation marks) refers to the song or single.
• Pac-Man Fever in italics refers to the album.
• Video game titles are also given in italics (e.g. Ms. Pac-Man) unless they're within a song title. For example, it's "Pac-Man Fever" and not "Pac-Man Fever". This is to help reduce confusion.

These conventions apply to all album and song titles mentioned in the blog. The error you're most likely to see is my forgetting to italicize a video game title. Feel free to let me know if you see that or find an instance where the meaning isn't clear.

Notes on labels

I originally envisioned this project as just covering the 52 items. Then I started to track how "Pac-Man Fever" did on the charts. And cover versions of the songs. And it's vintage performances on The Dr. Demento Show. And... well, you get the idea.

The point is, I've introduced the "1 of 52" label so you can just see the the weekly entries for Pac-Man Fever items. In fact, here's a quick guide to what the labels will show you.

• 1 of 52  — one of the 52 weekly items that are the basis for this project
• charts — performance on the weekly charts of 1982
• cover — a Wednesday Cover (cover versions of the songs from Pac-Man Fever)
• in the media — vintage appearances on radio and television
• meta — posts about the blog itself (like this one)
• off-topic — Off-topic Tuesday (other video game songs or things not directly PMF-related)

If you're on the full version of the site (as opposed to the mobile version) you can see a list of all the labels on the right. The other labels mostly refer to the format or type of items, in case you just want to see things in certain categories.

Introduction

Hi, I'm "Eclectic Lee" Seitz and apparently I'm the world's biggest Pac-Man Fever fan. That is, the song and album by Buckner and Garcia, not the entire phenomenon. (But I like Pac-Man just fine.) I've somewhat impromptu decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the song and album by stealing, er, borrowing an idea from Tim Lapetino. To celebrate the game's 40th anniversary, he did "365 of Pac", which was 365 days of Pac-Man. There's not quite as much specifically Pac-Man Fever memorabilia as Pac-Man, so I'm doing 52 Weeks of PMF!

A Bit of Background

I was fortunate to have a mother who was also into video games when I was a child back in the 1980s. In fact, she was the one who discovered a Pac-Man cocktail table in an out-of-the-way sandwich shop and took me to go see it. This was the first time we'd seen the game. There were many subsequent trips to go play it. It didn't take long, however, for you to find the game everywhere! Pac-Man Fever truly swept the nation.

I don't remember exactly when or how I became aware of the song "Pac-Man Fever", but I probably heard it on the radio. Nor am I exactly sure how I discovered there was an entire album of video game related songs by the same artist. You see, I'd not yet hit that age where you're all in to popular music. But I do vaguely remember making a trip to a record store to seek out this album. Mostly likely it was my mother who actually bought it.

What I do remember is copying it to cassette tape and taking it an a cassette player -- no, not a boom box, just a cassette recorder -- to elementary school to share with my friends. Sadly, I forget their reaction. But I wound up listening to that cassette a lot! And for many, many years. I could fit all the songs on one side, except one. So "Mousetrap", a song about a video game I had yet to see in any arcade, got consigned to the back side. (A local Putt-Putt Golf and Games did eventually get the game.)

Fast forward to about 1994. The World Wide Web is just taking off. I was already on the Internet with e-mail and Usenet and was part of a community that shared my passion for the video games of the '80s, both home and arcade. So "classic video games" became one of the first sections when I created my personal web page. I still had my album, so I decided that the full credits from the back of the Pac-Man Fever album is something unique I could share. (Remember, things like Discogs.com didn't exist back then.) Eventually I added more information about the song and album. Today that site still exists as "Pac-Man Fever Forever".

Genesis and What's to Come

So when Pac-Man celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2020, it made me realize that meant the song and album had that same anniversary looming. As mentioned above, Tim Lapetino started his 365 of Pac project and that got me thinking. I probably don't have nearly enough items to do 365 days, but I could do 52 weeks. But "Pac-Man Fever" wasn't release until October 1981, so I had plenty of time to think about it. But being the master procrastinator I am, I did not. Then I woke up this morning and realized it was October now and if I was going to do this, I better get to it!

So, what are you going to see as part of this project? Good question! I haven't completely figured that out myself. I'll be sharing photos of records -- including international releases -- and memorabilia and cover versions of the songs. We'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of various milestones on various record charts as they happen, because I have those dates! Beyond that, I my plan is to mostly cover things in chronological order as best I can. I'm using this as week zero to give myself a little time to come up with a more complete plan. Let's see if  I do or not. Regardless, I at least know where to start next week, so I'll see you then.