Pac-Man

• 1. Introduction

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  Pac-Man arrived in arcades on the 22nd of May 1980, and within two years it had earned more than a billion dollars in quarters from American players alone. A yellow circle eating dots in a maze does not sound like a cultural revolution. Yet by 1982, an estimated 30 million Americans were playing it every week, merchandise sales had exceeded a billion dollars in the US, and a player in San Francisco reportedly shot someone for interrupting a game. The questions worth asking are not just how a maze game conquered the world, but why it conquered it so completely, and why it reached people that no video game had ever reached before.

• 2. A Designer with a Different Vision

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  Toru Iwatani was 24 years old when he was assigned to Namco's in-house video-game development group, and his first game, Gee Bee, released in 1978, was not a success. He helped produce two sequels, Bomb Bee and Cutie Q, both in 1979, before turning to the project that would define his career.

  Iwatani looked at arcades in the late 1970s and saw a problem. The games were violent, the spaces were seedy, and the audiences were almost exclusively men. He decided his next game would be nonviolent and cheerful, and he wanted it to draw women and couples into arcades, which he believed would transform the atmosphere into something more family-friendly. He centered the game around eating, reasoning that women enjoy sweets.

  The character's name came from the Japanese onomatopoeia "paku paku taberu", which describes the sound of a mouth opening and closing repeatedly. Iwatani has often told the story of a pizza with a missing slice as the visual inspiration, but in a 1986 interview he clarified that the character's shape also came from rounding and simplifying the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (口). The ghosts were designed to be cute and colorful with expressive blue eyes, drawing on Iwatani's work on Cutie Q and his admiration for the television series Casper the Friendly Ghost and the manga series Obake no Q-Taro.

  Namco president Masaya Nakamura had originally wanted all four ghosts to be red and indistinguishable from one another. Iwatani pushed back, arguing that distinct colors and personalities would prevent the game from becoming too boring or too difficult. His colleagues backed him unanimously. The ghosts were named Shadow, Speedy, Bashful, and Pokey in English, with Japanese names that translate roughly as chase, ambush, fickle, and playing dumb.

• 3. Building the Machine

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  Development of the game that became Pac-Man began in early 1979 and took one year and five months to finish, the longest development period for any video game to that date. Iwatani brought in nine Namco colleagues, including composer Toshio Kai, programmer Shigeo Funaki, and hardware engineer Shigeichi Ishimura.

  A key technological factor came from a parallel project inside Namco. While Pac-Man was in development, the company was also building Galaxian, which used a new RGB color display allowing sprites to show multiple colors at once, eliminating the colored cellophane strips that had been a standard workaround. Iwatani adopted this technology to give his game its bright pastel colors.

  The energizer mechanic, where eating a large flashing pellet temporarily reverses the power dynamic between Pac-Man and the ghosts, was inspired by Popeye, the cartoon character who gains superhuman strength by eating spinach. It is also believed that Iwatani drew on a Japanese children's story about a creature that protects children from monsters by eating them. The fruit bonus items were based on graphics from slot machines.

  Sound effects were among the last features added. In a design session, Iwatani ate fruit noisily and made gurgling noises to demonstrate to Toshio Kai exactly how he wanted the eating sounds to feel.

  The game's original title was Puck Man, derived directly from the paku paku phrase. When Namco prepared for the North American release, executives grew concerned that vandals would deface cabinets by changing the P to an F. Masaya Nakamura chose the name Pac-Man because he felt it was closer to the original Japanese pronunciation of Pakkuman. In Europe the game briefly appeared under both titles, and early American promotional material had used the name Snapper before Pac-Man was settled on.

• 4. From Japan to North America

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  Location testing for Puck Man began on the 22nd of May 1980 in Shibuya, Tokyo. Non-gamers found it easy to learn; many arcade regulars were initially unimpressed. A private showing followed in June, then a nationwide Japanese release in July.

  When Namco presented Pac-Man and Rally-X at the AMOA tradeshow in November 1980, the industry consensus was that Rally-X would be the bigger hit. Play Meter magazine described both games as receiving mild attention at the show. Atari declined to distribute Pac-Man, and Midway Manufacturing stepped in, announcing its acquisition of the manufacturing rights on the 22nd of November and releasing the games in December.

  Midway initially manufactured 5,000 units for the United States, expecting modest performance. What happened instead was rapid and intense. Within one year, more than 100,000 arcade units had been sold, grossing more than a billion dollars in quarters. Some arcades purchased entire rows of Pac-Man cabinets. The game overtook Atari's Asteroids as the best-selling arcade game in the country and surpassed the film Star Wars in total revenue.

  In Japan, the game had first faced stiff competition from Namco's own Galaxian, which appealed to the established male player base. But Pac-Man eventually claimed the title of Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1980, ending two consecutive years of dominance by Taito's Space Invaders. The shift in Japan away from space shooters and toward action games featuring comic characters traces in part to that moment.

  Midway's Stan Jarocki described Pac-Man as "the first commercial videogame to involve large numbers of women as players." Among the nine arcade games covered by How to Win Video Games in 1982, Pac-Man was the only one where women made up a majority of players.

• 5. The Pac-Man Economy

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  By 1982 the number of arcade units in the United States had tripled to 400,000, and Midway had between 95 and 105 licensees selling Pac-Man merchandise. There were more than 500 Pac-Man related products, ranging from bumper stickers and breakfast cereals to a 20,000-dollar Ms. Pac-Man choker with 14 karat gold. AT&T sold a Pac-Man telephone. Merchandise sales in the US exceeded a billion dollars that year.

  The Atari 2600 home version, designed by Tod Frye and published by Atari, Inc. in 1982, was widely criticized for its flickering ghosts and inaccurate maze, yet it sold over 8 million copies and became the console's best-selling title. Coleco's tabletop mini-arcade unit sold over 1.5 million units in 1982 alone. The Pac-Man Nelsonic Game Watch sold more than 500,000 units the same year. Mobile phone ports eventually accumulated over 30 million paid downloads.

  The Buckner and Garcia song "Pac-Man Fever," released in 1981, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and received a Gold certification for more than 1 million records sold by 1982, with total sales reaching 2.5 million copies as of 2008. The group's Pac-Man Fever album sold over 1 million copies.

  In a 1983 interview, Namco president Masaya Nakamura reflected that while he had expected success, "I never thought it would be this big." Total estimated arcade earnings for Pac-Man range from $3.5 billion to higher figures when adjusted for inflation, and the game's combined revenue across all versions is estimated at more than 14 billion dollars.

• 6. The Ghost Intelligence

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  Each of the four ghosts was programmed with a distinct artificial intelligence to keep the game from becoming either trivially easy or punishingly hard. Blinky, the red ghost, simply chases Pac-Man directly. Pinky and Inky work to cut off Pac-Man's path, attempting to position themselves ahead of him. Clyde alternates between chasing and fleeing based on his distance from Pac-Man.

  The 256th level produces an integer overflow that renders half the screen unplayable. This "kill screen" is the hard ceiling of the game, and reaching it in good standing requires eating every dot, energizer, fruit, and blue ghost on the first 255 levels without losing a life, then using all six remaining lives to maximize points on level 256. That sequence produces the perfect score of 3,333,360 points.

  Billy Mitchell became the first person to achieve a publicly witnessed and verified perfect score without manipulating the hardware, on the 3rd of July 1999. Twin Galaxies later removed his record after a 2018 investigation into unrelated Donkey Kong performances, but Guinness World Records reversed course and reinstated Mitchell's achievement on the 18th of June 2020. As of July 2020, seven other players had also achieved perfect scores on original arcade hardware.

  The world record for the fastest perfect score, according to Twin Galaxies, belongs to David Race, with a time of 3 hours, 28 minutes, and 49 seconds.

  In December 1982, an eight-year-old named Jeffrey R. Yee received a letter from President Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a claimed score of 6,131,940 points, a number that would have required passing level 256. In September 1983, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies toured the East Coast to find gamers who said they could pass that level. None demonstrated the ability.

• 7. Ripples Across Media

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  Hanna-Barbera Productions produced an animated series adaptation for ABC that ran from 1982 to 1983 and became the highest-rated Saturday morning cartoon show in the US during late 1982. A computer-generated animated series, Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, aired on Disney XD from the 15th of June 2013 to the 25th of May 2015.

  The game's artificial intelligence directly influenced programmers who later worked at companies including Bethesda. John Romero credited Pac-Man as the single biggest influence on his career, and Wolfenstein 3D contains a Pac-Man level viewed from a first-person perspective. The concept of power-ups that briefly reverse the player-enemy relationship, central to Pac-Man's design, spread across the medium and became a standard element of action games.

  Pac-Man was cited as the first game with cutscenes, in the form of brief comic interludes featuring Pac-Man and Blinky, though Space Invaders Part II used a similar between-level approach in 1979. The maze genre itself expanded rapidly after Pac-Man, spawning titles including Taxman and Snack Attack for the Apple II, Jawbreaker for Atari 8-bit computers, and K.C. Munchkin for the Odyssey2. Atari sued Philips over K.C. Munchkin, winning a court order that pulled the game from shelves.

  The term "Pac-Man defense" entered business vocabulary to describe a hostile takeover target that turns around and attempts to acquire its pursuer, a reference to the energizer mechanic. In mathematics, the "Pac-Man renormalization," named for a visual resemblance to the character, appears in the work of Dudko, Lyubich, and Selinger on the Mandelbrot set.

  On the 3rd of August 2016, the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Rio featured a segment promoting Tokyo as the 2020 host city, in which Pac-Man and the ghosts raced along a running track. Guinness World Records certified in 2009 that Pac-Man was the most recognizable video game character in the United States, identified by 94 percent of the population, compared to 93 percent for Mario.