Pac-Man

Originally called Pakkuman, and then released as Puck-Man, the game turned 30 last month.

Pac-Man was created by a 25-year-old game designer, Toru Iwatani, with the typical concerns of young men—mainly, eating. He designed it, he says, to bring women and couples into game parlours, which were thought of as seedy places. The iconic symbol was a simplified depiction of a human face. 

It was originally called Pakkuman (‘Paku-paku’ is slang for the sound the mouth makes when it opens and closes). The game was released in Japan in 1980 as Puck-Man, but showed few signs of becoming as popular as it eventually did. In the US, the game was renamed Pac-Man because the company feared ‘Puck-Man’ was just begging for a rude name change. Once it was released in the US, audiences knew that it was special instantly. It turned 30 last month.

Iwatani created one more game after Pac-Man, but it was a hard act to follow. He became a producer and then supervisor of the game division at Namco, where he remained for 30 years, finally leaving in 2007 to lecture at Tokyo Polytechnic University. The last game he developed was Pac-Man Championship Edition for the Xbox 360 console.

Pac-Man is chased by four ghosts named Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. The ghosts were based on a ghost in Japanese manga called Obake no Q-taro. They follow him through 256 levels, each ghost playing a specific role. One ambushes, another chases, the third is fickle and the fourth is stupid.  

Only six people have scored the maximum possible 3,333,360 points. That’s small, given how many have played the game. According to CNN, towards the end of the 1990s, a company that tracks video game scores “said it believed the game had been played more than 10 billion times in the 20th century”. And that’s only arcade machines. Wikipedia states Pac-Man was released on ‘Apple II series, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, the Atari 8-bit computers, IBM Personal Computer, Intellivision, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64 and Nintendo Entertainment System’. 

Pac-Man had a sequel, but it was designed outside the company. They called it Ms, Pac-Man.

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