Pac-Man is an arcade game that was developed by Namco employee Toru Iwatani over 18 months between 1978 and 1979. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is universally considered as an icon of 1980s popular culture. Pac-Man is often credited with being a landmark in video game history, and is among the most famous arcade games of all time. The character also appears in more than 30 officially licensed games and sequels, as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs.
Competitors and distributors were taken completely by surprise by Pac-Man’s success in North America in 1980. The appeal of Pac-Man was such that the game caught on immediately with the public; it quickly became far more popular than anything seen in the game industry before. Pac-Man outstripped Asteroids as the greatest selling arcade game of the time.
A great deal of Pac-Man merchandise was marketed in the 1980s, from t-shirts to toys to hand-held video game imitations to pasta. There was also a Saturday morning TV cartoon called Pac-Man. This show, based on the game, was produced by Hanna-Barbera and lasted two years, from 1982 to 1984.
But where did the PacMan game idea come from? Read what Toru Iwatani (the game's creator) said about:
IWATANI: First of all, the kanji word "taberu," to eat, came to mind. Game design, you see, often begins with words. I started playing with the word, making sketches in my notebook. All the computer games available at the time were of the violent type - war games and space invader types. 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. The story I like to tell about the origin of Pac Man is that one lunchtime I was quite hungry and I ordered a whole pizza. I helped myself to a wedge and what was left was the idea for the Pac Man shape.
INTERVIEWER: Is that story about the pizza really true?
IWATANI: Well, it's half true. In Japanese the character for mouth (kuchi) is a square shape. It's not circular like the pizza, but I decided to round it out. There was the temptation to make the Pac Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it. Food is the other part of the basic concept. In my initial design I had put the player in the midst of food all over the screen. As I thought about it. I realised the player wouldn't know exactly what to do: the purpose of the game would be obscure. So I created a maze and put the food in it. Then whoever played the game would have some structure by moving through the maze. The Japanese have a slang word - paku paku - they use to describe the motion of the mouth opening and closing while one eats. The name Pac Man came from that word.
INTERVIEWER: Once you decided Pac Man would be a game of food and eating, what was the next step?
IWATANI: Well, there's not much entertainment in a game of eating, so we decided to create enemies to inject a little excitement and tension. The player had to fight the enemies to get the food. And each of the enemies has its own character. The enemies are four little ghost-shaped monsters, each of them a different colour - blue, yellow, pink and red. I used four different colours mostly to please the women who play - I thought they would like the pretty colours.
This interview with the designer of Pac Man, Toru Iwatani, comes from a book named "Programmers at Work" by Susan Lammers published in 1986
