The team also added new colors, sounds, animations, and a new starring character, Crazy Otto. It also designed the monsters to look different, again to avoid copyright infringement. It added small cutscenes between levels that showed Otto courting a female version of himself, Anna.
The design of Otto was based on a design for “Pac-Man” from art on the original cabinet, which showed him having legs. General Computer actually used a Lite-Brite peg board as a way to design characters, like the new monsters that replaced the ghosts.
They also changed some of the fruit bonuses, replacing the Galaxian character because of copyright concerns. They also added a pretzel, a pear, and a banana.
Apparently, they used all the lessons learned about intellectual property law from its Atari lawsuit to try and make Crazy Otto safe from a similar lawsuit.
General Computer then made a deal on October 29, 1981. Midway bought the kit and agreed to market it, but they still didn’t know about the Atari deal.
An early design of “Ms. Pac-Man” included a version with long red hair and a yellow bow before settling on the iconic design with a red bow and beauty mark. Shortly before release, they realized they had a cutscene that shows her with a baby.
Concerned by the idea of having the character appear to have a child out of wedlock, they changed the name to “Ms. Pac-Man.”