Classic Arcade Games

- Namco estimates that the original PacMan arcade title has been played more than ten billion times in its 20-year history. Namco's total PacMan revenues have reached $100 million... one quarter at a time.

- PacMan was inspired by a pizza with a slice missing. Namco designer Tohru Iwatani went out for the evening with some friends and then dove for dinner. The rest is history.

- 1982 saw the debut of ABC's animated cartoon, The PacMan Show. It ran for two years as PacMan tried to save his friends and Pac-Land from the evil Mezmaron.

- Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia spoofed Ted Nugent's song Cat Scratch Fever and turned it into PacMan Fever. The song hit number nine.

- Dozens of hacked versions of PacMan and Ms. PacMan exist. These games give the Pac character a speed bonus with the push of a button or more challenging mazes with complex series of turns.

- It took eight people 15 months to complete the original PacMan arcade title. Four worked on the hardware, four worked on the software.

- PacMan and his fellow Pacs travel 20 percent faster through mazes that have been cleared of dots than when they're eating. If you've got a ghost on your tail, head for open ground.

- PacMan has been licensed to more than 250 companies for over 400 products. There are PacMan air fresheners, cereal boxes, flip phones, costumes, record books, and even a hot rod.

- The business world has co-opted PacMan's name as a technique to protect against a hostile takeover. The defending company would instead swallow the larger company in a move known as the PacMan defense.

- In July of 1999, Florida resident and die hard PacMan fan Billy Mitchell achieved the first perfect score in PacMan (3,333,360) after playing for six hours straight. He beat all 256 screens eating every dot, fruit, and ghost (all four ghosts were eaten with each power pellet) - using only one PacMan!

- The author of this article has a huge PacMan pillow on his sofa. He also inexplicably gained 50 pounds over the course of writing this feature.

PacMan is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the U.S. by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980.[1][2] Immensely popular in the United States from its original release to the present day, PacMan is universally considered as one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture. Upon its release, the game became a social phenomenon[4] that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among other things, an animated television series and music.

When PacMan was released, most arcade video games in North America were primarily space shooters such as Space Invaders, Defender or Asteroids. The most visible minority were sports games that were mostly derivative of Pong. PacMan succeeded by creating a new genre and appealing to both genders.[5] PacMan is often credited with being a landmark in video game history, and is among the most famous arcade games of all time.[6] The character also appears in more than 30 officially licensed game spin-offs,[7] as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs.[8] According to the Davie-Brown Index, PacMan has the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers, recognized by 94 percent of them.[9]

History

The game was developed primarily by Namco employee T.ru Iwatani over eighteen months. The original title was pronounced pakku-man (....., pakku-man?) and was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic phrase paku-paku taberu (......., paku-paku taberu?),[10] where paku-paku describes (the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.[11] Although it is often cited that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice,[4] he admitted in a 1986 interview that it was a half-truth and the character design also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (.) as well as the basic concept of eating.[12] Iwatani's efforts to appeal to a wider audience.beyond the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers.eventually led him to add elements of a maze. The result was a game he named Puck Man.

When first launched in Japan by Namco, the game received a lukewarm response, as Space Invaders and other similar games were more popular at the time.[5]

The following year, the game was picked up for manufacture in the United States by Bally division Midway, under the altered title PacMan (see Localization, below). American audiences welcomed a breakaway from conventions set by Space Invaders, which resulted in unprecedented popularity and revenue that rivaled its successful predecessor, as even Iwatani was impressed with U.S. sales.[12] The game soon became a worldwide phenomenon within the video game industry, resulting in numerous sequels and merchandising tie-ins. PacMan's success bred imitation, and an entire genre of maze-chase video games soon emerged.

The unique game design inspired game publishers to be innovative rather than conservative, and encouraged them to speculate on game designs that broke from existing genres. PacMan introduced an element of humor into video games that designers sought to imitate, and appealed to a wider demographic than the teenage boys who flocked to the action-oriented games.

PacMan's success in North America took competitors and distributors completely by surprise in 1980. Marketing executives who saw PacMan at a trade show prior to release completely overlooked the game (along with the now classic Defender), while they looked to a racing car game called Rally-X as the game to outdo that year.[13] The appeal of PacMan was such that the game caught on immediately with the public; it quickly became far more popular than anything seen in the game industry up to that point. PacMan outstripped Asteroids as the best-selling arcade game of the time,[14] and would go on to sell over 350,000 units.[15]

PacMan went on to become an icon of video game culture during the 1980s, and a lot of PacMan merchandise was marketed with the character's image, from t-shirts and toys to hand-held video game imitations and even specially shaped pasta.[16] The Killer List of Videogames lists PacMan as the #1 video game on its "Top 10 Most Popular Video games" list.[17] PacMan, and other video games of the same general type, are often cited as an identifying cultural experience of Generation X, particularly its older members, sometimes called Baby Busters.

Ghosts

North American PacMan title screen, showing the official ghost namesInitially, PacMan's enemies were referred to as monsters on the arcade cabinet, but soon became colloquially known as ghosts.

The ghosts are bound by the maze in the same way as PacMan, but generally move slightly faster than the player, although they slow down when turning corners and slow down significantly while passing through the tunnels on the sides of the maze (PacMan passes through these tunnels unhindered). PacMan slows down slightly while eating dots, potentially allowing a chasing ghost to catch him.

Blinky, the red ghost, speeds up after a certain number of dots are eaten (this number gets lower in higher levels). The accelerated Blinky is unofficially called Cruise Elroy.[19]

Behavior

A ghost always maintains its current direction until it reaches an intersection, at which point it can turn left or right. Periodically, the ghosts will reverse direction and head for the corners of the maze (commonly referred to as "scatter mode"), before reverting to their normal behavior. In an interview, Iwatani stated that he had designed each ghost with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming impossibly difficult or boring to play. However, while players generally agree that the behaviors of each ghost add depth and challenge to the game, no consensus has been reached on exactly how to describe those behaviors.[21]

Despite the seemingly random nature of some of the ghosts, their movements are strictly deterministic, enabling experienced players to devise precise sequences of movements for each level (termed "patterns") that allow them to complete the levels without ever being caught. A later revision of the game code altered the ghosts' behavior, but new patterns were soon developed for that behavior as well. Players have also learned how to exploit other flaws in the ghosts' behavior, including finding places where they can hide indefinitely without moving, and a code bug occasionally allows PacMan to pass through a non-blue ghost unharmed. Several patterns have been developed to exploit this bug. The bug arises from the fact that the game logic only performs collision detection on tile granularity. If a ghost and PacMan switch tiles simultaneously, a collision isn't detected.[22]