Pac-Man Arrives in Saudi Arabia: In-Flight Airline Magazine Ad

One of my favorite relatively inexpensive acquisitions in the past little while is this roughly A4-sized magazine page advertising the release of VCS/2600 Pac-Man. It comes from a Saudia (Saudi Arabian Airlines Corporation) in-flight magazine called Ahlan Wasahlan; roughly: “Hello and Welcome”. The first flag carrier airline of Saudi Arabia, Saudia was at this time (~1982) the largest airline operating in the Middle East.

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These magazines were often advertising luxury items to a jet-set audience: a quick perusal of magazine pages shown in eBay listings shows ads featuring pricey wristwatches, fancy jewelry, designer colognes/perfumes, and cutting-edge electronics technology. Some of these items could even be purchased while aboard the plane. Seeing janky ol’ VCS Pac-Man alongside such objects of extravagance is, well, delightful to me.

The in-flight magazine ad for Pac-Man is printed nearly entirely in Arabic (save for the tiny text to the left of the box art which says "PAC-MAN is Licensed by Namco America Inc."). This is atypical of most Atari print ads I'm familiar with; i.e. international ads will usually feature at least Atari’s English wordmark/logo somewhere on the page. One wonders if Atari International had to approve the use of the company name in Arabic text in place of their standard wordmark, or whether this was an advertisement designed solely by the distributor.

The text across the top reads:

باك - مان قد وصل من اتاري

Pac-Man has arrived from Atari

I suppose technically the text says “Bak-Man” — since there’s not exactly a direct characterization of the letter P in the Arabic language they've gone with a phonetic approximation. The finer print underneath the box art image states:

At the bottom of the page on the far right, accompanied by the company name in stylized Arabic, is a logo for العالمية (Al Alamiah). The same logo appears on many of their other offerings of this era. Al Alamiah was an eminent Kuwaiti consumer technology distributor and electronics retailer that operated showrooms in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries in the early 1980s. They’re maybe best known for theirصخر (Sakhr) computers: MSX machines adapted and localized for use in Arabic-speaking regions.

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Finally, at the bottom of the page next to the logo:

الرياض ٤٠٤٤٢٠٢ - جدة ٦٤٣٤٩٠٩ - الخبر ٨٦٤٥٩٧٨

Riyadh 4044202 - Jeddah 6434909 - Al Khobar 8645978

These were presumably Al Alamiah's Saudi retailer/showroom locations and phone numbers at the time.

This Pac-Man ad (probably c. late 1982) more than likely pre-dates Atari's licensing agreement with the unrelated الشركة الدولية aDawliah (headquartered in Al Khobar, with branch offices in Riyadh and Jeddah). Established in 1979, aDawliah was a licensee/agent for a number of notable electronics and music companies.

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aDawliah is well-known to Atari connoisseurs as the distributor of the نجمNajm ("Star") version of the 65XE computer, with its custom Arabic-language OS and multi-language keyboard.

That said, aDawliah also became the local sole authorized distributor of the 2600 at some point. I haven't seen many of these boxes around, and I'd love to eventually find an affordable one for the collection.

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As has become abundantly clear over my years of scouring the globe for weird stuff, everywhere around the world that the Atari 2600 made inroads, unauthorized hardware and pirate cartridges did too. As far as Saudi Arabia goes, I currently have only one other thing in my collection that I can definitively point to as having a Saudi connection: this unauthorized multi-cart made in Taiwan for distribution in the Middle East.

I've yet to see another of these boxes. I'm sure more are out there, but we don't see too much Atari stuff come out of Saudi Arabia. Anwyay, it contains a fairly standard Funvision-style V-case multi-cart, and the box references a Jeddah company called Banasr S.S. Company & Partners For Trade (and, as an aside: bonus points awarded if you can puzzle out what 2600 game "THEAMK" is.)

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They also put their ELECTRONICS brand logo on a Funvision 2600 clone console, which makes some sense given the above cartridge (and the fact that Funvision carts are found in seemingly every corner of the globe). However, it wasn't until literally yesterday that I saw anything else with this logo -- someone recently posted a Banasr-imported/branded public address amplifier for sale on Facebook Marketplace in Saudi Arabia with the same logo.

When searching for more info about this specific amplifier, I found a YouTube video from D' Tech TV showing repair of a unit that sports a very similar logo, with AL SHOROOQ(The Sunrise) in the middle. This looks like it correlates with sunrise imagery now inscribed inside the lowercase e-shaped logo. Hmm... could this help us get more info?

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These kinds of research rabbit holes are often the only way we can learn much about these international distributors. But before we proceed... for anyone thinking the tiny Arabic text hidden in the box logo might hold some answers… nope, it just says إلكترونيات(Electronics).

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Of course, in the process of composing this blog post and thus doing further digging, I was able to find the Taiwan exporter that owns these logos! Let's quickly review how it happened...

First, having found this new potentially related logo, I searched Taiwan's public trademark database for English text "AL SHOROOQ". 145 potential results were returned. One of them, a trademark applied for in 1992 and registered in 1993, certainly looked like it could be related; it doesn't look exactly the same as what's on that amplifier, but it's definitely worth investigating further:

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Let's now search the same database using the name of the company that registered the mark: 揚軒企業有限公司 (Yangxuan Enterprise Co., Ltd.)...

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Bingo! There's our original "Electronics" logo, right above the also registered AL SHOROOQ logo. What more can we learn? Let's look...

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We find that this was applied for in early 1988, and registered in early 1989. This definitely makes sense with respect to the general Atari-compatible clone timeline. Yangxuan Enterprise lists these logos as Class 008, which specifically relate to import/export trade. Finally, we have an address for the exporter: No. 24 Jilin Road in the Zhongshan District in Taipei, Taiwan.

On the surface, this all seems like nice info, but what good is it? Well, for now, the story stops here... but perhaps at some point we'll find that this exporter was in the same building as a manufacturer. Or we'll find that the company changed their name from something prior, and that will connect some new dots. Information begets more information in these very niche wild goose-chases, and if you don't search online for more about a random 1990s PA amplifier model number on a random Tuesday night in August, you won't find anything.

In closing, a brief plea: if you're a resident of Saudi Arabia and can potentially help me acquire some Atari-related things locally, please reach out -- thanks!

theAtari.spot Note: I used online tools for the translations found in this post, and the results seem sensible to me. That being said, I'm always interested in improved translations from those who are fluent!