Is it morally wrong that this was created? I appreciate that this exists, and personally am more likely to purchase or promote official Pac-Man products because of it. I think it's a good thing.

Legality is important, but underneath that is the purpose of law itself. I like the idea of keeping in mind both legality and the intent of the law.

If you are making something cool, that adds value (including entertainment), and does not pretend to be, or detract from those you borrow ideas from, it seems ok to me. You may disagree with my particular idea of fair use - the main point is to promote thought about general morality, and not just condemn on the basis of legality alone.

So I presume that the person who made this knows it's "illegal" to use the pacman name and doesn't care. So that's fine, its not like I am not going to report him to whoever owns the ip.

The previous example, a) it wasn't clear that the author knew it was not right b) the people affected where the type of people who would post to HN.

Let me ask you this, do you see anything wrong with someone creating a hipmunk clone called "hipmunk.co" and use their exact CSS and HTML? It's the same situation. If you see nothing wrong with that, then that's where we disagree.

Edit: there's no reason why he can't provide entertainment and value but just name it something else, and use original graphics. To clarify: no one is arguing against the creation of a game that plays the same. The argument is using the exact name and artwork.

hipmunk is not over 30 years old, though, and is not far older than the USA's originally agreed upon reasonably limited lifetime of copyright protection, before Disney lobbying created the never-ending copyright extension in the 20th century. So there's that distinction.