Pac-Man was introduced to a new generation last year, but this time as a tricenarian. That’s right: Pac-Man is 30. And while everyone knows who Pac-Man is, few know of his enormous impact on the gaming industry.
Pac-Man was single-handedly responsible for exposing a new generation to electronic games, and his cultural impact is still leaving traces 30 years later.
Pac-Man was the result of one man’s inspiration to create a nonviolent game that appealed to a female audience. Toru Iwatani originally aspired to design pinball machines, but by the time he graduated from college, video games had become the newest form of popular entertainment. He acquired a job with Namco, one of the earliest Japanese video game companies.
In 1979, Iwatani began working on a game that would revolutionize the industry. He settled on the idea of eating for its universal appeal, and decided to name his character after a Japanese onomatopoeia for an eating noise, “pakku.” His design focused on characters that would be simple and cute, but still appeal to the fans of the space shooters that were popular at the time.
Iwatani was pondering the game’s hero when the idea dawned on him during mealtime.
“The actual figure of Pac-Man came about as I was having pizza for lunch. I took one wedge and there it was, the figure of Pac-Man,” Iwatani said in Ultimate Video Game History.
He settled on colorful ghosts as antagonists and featured a point system based on pellets and fruits to appeal to a mass audience.
“There were no games that everyone could enjoy, and especially none for women. I wanted to come up with a ‘comical’ game women could enjoy,” Iwatani said.
The result was a game named, Pakkuman in Japan, a “maze-chase” game that focused on nonviolent pellet consumption. Originally, the game was adapted as Puck Man for the North American release.
However, in 1980, the game was picked up by Midway for American distribution, and the name was changed from Puck Man to Pac-Man, largely because of fears of vandals changing the ‘P’ to ‘F’. If not for the swift intervention of Midway, Pac-Man could’ve attracted an entirely different audience.
Pac-Man immediately sold more than 100,000 units in North America, which bumped Asteroids off as the best-selling arcade game of its time. Time magazine projected that in 15 months, the arcade gobbled an estimated $1 billion in quarters. As a result, the video game business quickly became viewed as a profitable enterprise, and arcades began springing up all around the U.S.
Pac-Man was the first video game to be widely adopted into popular culture, spawning a TV show, a Weird Al parody and hundreds of digital imitators. Pac-Man even generated a hit music single, “Pac-Man Fever,” which went to #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. Our yellow hero eventually sealed his fate by appearing on the cover of Time Magazine in April 1982.
The rest is electronic history. Pac-Man and his crew have gone on to appear in more than 30 officially licensed game spin-offs, and in 2010 Google featured a free version of Pac-Man on its home page to commemorate his 30th anniversary.
So while he may be getting a little long in the tooth, Pac-Man’s legacy shows no signs of slowing. If you’re new to Pac-Man or just feeling nostalgic, Namco recently released a Pac-Man Championship DX Edition for multiple platforms. It’s worth picking up, if only to pay homage to one of the most respected franchises in the game industry.
Ryan Carpe is a graduate student studying journalism. If you don’t remember Pac-Man, email him at rc336801@ohiou.edu.
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