Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pac-Man was designed by Toru Iwatani of Namco, with development beginning in early 1979. Iwatani has said the character's shape partly came from seeing a pizza with a slice removed, and partly from rounding the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (口). He wanted to create a nonviolent, cheerful game that would attract women and couples to arcades.
Pac-Man was first released for location testing in Shibuya, Tokyo on the 22nd of May 1980, under the original title Puck Man. A nationwide Japanese release followed in July 1980. Midway Manufacturing released the game in North America under the Pac-Man name in December 1980.
Namco executives feared that vandals would deface arcade cabinets by changing the P in Puck Man to an F. Masaya Nakamura chose Pac-Man because he felt it was closer to the original Japanese pronunciation of Pakkuman. Early American promotional material briefly used the name Snapper before Pac-Man was settled on.
Pac-Man has generated more than 14 billion dollars in combined revenue across all versions. Arcade earnings alone are estimated at $3.5 billion, or $7.7 billion adjusted for inflation. The Atari 2600 version alone sold over 8 million copies and became that console's best-selling title.
The perfect score on the original Pac-Man arcade game is 3,333,360 points. Billy Mitchell was the first person to achieve a publicly witnessed and verified perfect score on unmodified hardware, on the 3rd of July 1999. Guinness World Records reinstated Mitchell's record on the 18th of June 2020 after briefly removing it.
Pac-Man ended the dominance of space shoot-em-ups that had followed Space Invaders in 1978 and established character-led action games as a major genre, leading to titles including Donkey Kong and Frogger in 1981. It was the first commercial video game to attract large numbers of women as players and the first broad licensing success in gaming. The game is credited with introducing power-ups, cutscenes, and enemy artificial intelligence with distinct personalities to the medium.