A new game is shown at an arcade trade show: before Halo, before World of Warcraft, before Myst, there was Pac-Man.
It wasn’t the first video game; arcade games (see here, here), including video ones, had existed for years. But Pac-Man turned video-gaming into a phenomenon by burning itself into the collective consciousness.
The brainchild of Toru Iwatani, a designer for Japanese software firm Namco, Pac-Man is a model of complex simplicity: the player controls a hungry-mouthed blob that navigates a two-dimensional maze, eating dots and ghosts while trying to avoid being eaten. The concept could have been dreamed up by a ten-year-old. But try racking up big points; there’s the rub.
After its release May 22, 1980, the game received a lukewarm reception in Japan (originally sold under the name Puck-Man). But it became an instant hit when it arrived in the United States. The name was supposedly changed to Pac-Man out of fears that some bright wit might alter the spelling into an obscenity.
Regardless of the name, Pac-Man quickly left every existing arcade game in its wake. Versions were made to accommodate virtually every platform out there, and spinoffs of the game itself, such as Ms. Pac-Man, were marketed to feed off the popularity of the original. Pac-Man is still being sold and remains one of the most popular video games of all time.
As for racking up points, it was twenty years (and millions of quarters) before anyone scored a perfect game: 3,333,360 points. Billy Mitchell took six hours on July 3, 1999, to navigate 256 boards (or screens), eating every single dot, blinking energizer blob, flashing blue ghost, and point-loaded fruit, without losing a single life. His reaction: “It was tremendously monotonous.”—TL, LK, CK