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The first focus test for Pac-Man was held on May 22, 1980, and the game was released in Japan in July of the same year. On June 29, the game was advertised on a digital billboard at the side of the Shinjuku Alta building, which is notable because advertising video games in this way was relatively rare at the time. In October of the same year, Pac-Man arrived in the United States, and in a single year from release, more than 100,000 units of the Pac-Man arcade were sold, making it the most successful arcade game in history.
The game begins with the player controlling Pac-Man's movement using either arrows on a keyboard or a joystick. The goal is to move Pac-Man around the maze to consume lines of 240 dots and avoid or attack four ghosts. As the game progresses, the ghosts leave their confinement area in the center of the maze and roam around it. If Pac-Man is spotted by one of the ghosts, they actively pursue him. Upon colliding with a ghost, Pac-Man loses a life, and the game restarts.
When players learned that there were predictable patterns to the ghosts' movement, they began devising precise routes for Pac-Man to follow. This apparent predictability, however, was offset by the extensive number of levels (256).
Each level features four power pellets in the corner. If Pac-Man can consume one of them, all ghosts change form and flee. During this event, Pac-Man may eat the ghosts for extra points and to temporarily return them to their confinement area. Bonus objects such as fruit may be consumed to earn additional points, with different objects having different point values. The game ends when Pac-Man has lost all (usually three) lives.
Toru Iwatani is the lead designer behind Pac-Man. Iwatani intention was to create a game that did not emphasize violence. Through theme, visual design, and color choice, Iwatani also hoped that Namco could market an arcade game that would appeal to female players. To that end, the concept centered around eating instead of shooting enemies, which was the prevailing trend at the time, as exampled by titles like Space Invaders and Galaxian.
Original Pac-Man design in low-bit format
In Pac-Man, players navigate through a maze using a joystick with the goal of consuming all the dots present on the level in order to advance to the next one. In Japanese slang, paku paku or "puck-puck" is an onomatopoeic expression of the snapping of a mouth open and shut, which is where the name Pac-Man comes from.
According to Iwatani, he came up with the idea for Pac-Man's design after ordering a pizza that arrived with one slice missing. The simple design quickly became iconic and recognizable. According to the May 2008 report by the Davie Brown Celebrity Index, Pac-Man was recognized by 94 percent of US consumers.
I had ordered a round pizza, and it was missing a piece. In a eureka moment, the shape of what is now Pac-Man flashed through my mind.
Pac-Man cabinet
In the early 80s, games with central characters were rare. Typically, the player was in control of an object, such as a spaceship. Pac-Man differentiated itself from this tendency by featuring a central character. The character's name original name was Puck-Man, but it was changed in America because of the potential for vandalism.
When asked about the importance of audiences identifying with a fictional character, Iwatani referenced a seventeenth-century haiku written by Matsuo Basho, which translates to, “So tranquil is the area, that the sounds of cicadas seep into the rocks.” Iwatani elaborated:
The ghosts chasing Pac-Man are named Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Each of the ghosts has its own personality based on its AI routine. Blinky constantly chases Pac-Man, Pinky attempts to ambush him, Inky's behavior is randomized and dependent on Pac-Man’s position, and Clyde will get near the player before fleeing to the bottom left corner, potentially cutting off an escape route.
The concept of consuming a power pill to give Pac-Man super strength came partly from the 1929 cartoon series Popeye and his partiality to spinach, and in part from the Japanese concept of kokoro (“spirit”) or life force. It is one of the first examples of a power-up in a video game.
In 1999, Billy Mitchell became the first person to reach a perfect Pac-Man score of 3,333,360 (the maximum score before the game bugs out on the 256th screen). However, Mitchell was later accused of cheating by a company supervising game records, Twin Galaxies. The record was matched by David Race in 2012.
Ms. Pac-Man was a spinoff of the original game developed in the U.S. in 1981, featuring a female Pac-Man with a ribbon on top. The game system remained largely unchanged, although some features were added, such as an alternating maze design system with two warp tunnels.
The Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. produced a Pac-Man-themed cartoon for prime-time broadcast on ABC television network channels, achieving ratings of up to 56 percent.
Buckner & Garcia released the hit single "Pac-Man Fever," which ranked ninth on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, while the record album went on to place as high as twenty-fourth in the music charts.
