Ms. Pac-Man

Ms. Pac-Man is a 1982 maze arcade game developed by the General Computer Corporation under supervision from Namco and manufactured by Bally Midway, serving as a sequel to Pac-Man (1980) and marking the debut of its title character, a female counterpart to Pac-Man distinguished by a ribbon worn atop her head.¹⁹¹⁷ It is widely credited as the first commercial arcade game to star a female protagonist.¹⁷

The game grew directly out of Pac-Man, the maze game developed by Toru Iwatani for Namco and first shown at a focus test on May 22, 1980, before its Japanese public release that July.¹⁷¹⁵ That original had been conceived by Iwatani with a planning credit to himself, sound by Toshio Kai, and programming by Shigeo Funaki.¹⁷ Pac-Man reached the United States in October 1980, where it was licensed and distributed by Bally’s Midway division, and became an enormous commercial success, selling more than 350,000 arcade units and dethroning contemporaries such as Space Invaders and Asteroids.¹⁵¹⁷ Within a year of its U.S. arrival more than 100,000 units were sold, and the character grew so ubiquitous that American fans came to describe Pac-Man as the “Mickey Mouse of the 80s”.¹⁷ Its nonviolent premise — navigating a maze to eat dots while avoiding the ghosts Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, with power pills temporarily allowing the player to eat the pursuing ghosts — was credited with broadening the arcade market to both women and men.¹⁵ Even when the player ate a ghost, it was not destroyed; its eyes floated home to regrow a body, part of the design that distinguished Pac-Man from the weapon-driven, outer-space games that dominated arcades at the time.¹⁵

Origins and development

Ms. Pac-Man began not as an authorized sequel but as an enhancement kit for Pac-Man titled Crazy Otto, created by programmers at the General Computer Corporation.¹⁴ While Crazy Otto was in development, GCC settled a lawsuit with Atari, Inc. over its Super Missile Attack conversion kit for Missile Command; the settlement barred GCC from selling conversion kits without the consent of the original game’s manufacturer.¹⁴ Rather than abandon Crazy Otto, the programmers presented the finished game to Midway, Namco’s American distributor of Pac-Man, which was eager to capitalize on the original’s success with a sequel.¹⁴ Midway bought the rights to Crazy Otto and worked with GCC and Namco to prepare it for release, altering sprites, text, and minor game elements to reflect the Pac-Man series; the game’s name and characters passed through multiple changes in the final development.¹⁴ According to Namco’s own history, Ms. Pac-Man “was born in the United States, featuring a female PAC-MAN with a ribbon on top,” retaining the same core game system while adding features such as an alternating maze design and two warp tunnels.¹⁷

Sources give varying release dates for the game’s arcade debut in 1982, ranging from January 13 to February 3.¹⁸¹⁴

Gameplay

Ms. Pac-Man preserves the essential structure of Pac-Man — clearing an enclosed maze of pellets while eluding four ghosts, and eating larger power pellets to turn the ghosts blue and edible — but introduces several distinguishing features.¹³ The game uses four different mazes: a pink maze for the first two levels, a light blue maze for levels 3 through 5, a brown maze for levels 6 through 9, and a dark blue maze for levels 10 through 14, after which the configurations alternate every four levels, allowing play to continue for an unlimited period.¹³ The maze walls are rendered in solid color rather than as outlines, making the paths easier to read and letting even a novice player plan a route.¹³ Three of the four mazes have two sets of warp tunnels instead of one, and the bonus fruits bounce randomly through the maze rather than remaining fixed in the center; once all the fruits have been found, they appear at random positions for the rest of the game.¹³

The ghosts behave less predictably than in the original, with Pinky and Blinky moving semi-randomly while Sue and Inky retain fixed patterns until the first reversal.¹³ The addition of Sue rounded out the ghost quartet; the four are commonly named Pinky, Blinky, Sue, and Inky.¹³ The title character’s death animation differs from Pac-Man’s, spinning around rather than folding in on itself, and the game adds three animated intermissions, new sound effects, music, its own death sound, and an opening theme.¹³

Arcade Game Series: Ms. Pac-Man - TrailerGematsu

Reception and legacy

Ms. Pac-Man was welcomed on release and, by Namco’s account, “took the US by storm, even beyond PAC-MAN”.¹⁷ It joined a wave of Pac-Man spin-offs including Super Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, and Baby Pac-Man, and reference accounts single it out as having achieved “a level of success and cultural recognition worthy of the original,” where most other sequels did not.¹⁵¹⁷ Super Pac-Man, released in Japan in 1982 as the next entry in the series, replaced the eating of pac-dots with the munching of fruits and introduced a Super Power Pellet that transformed the character into an invincible form, illustrating how quickly Namco iterated on the formula in the years surrounding Ms. Pac-Man.¹⁷

The broader Pac-Man phenomenon of the early 1980s spawned an extensive licensing franchise of toys, clothes, chalkboards, pillows, costumes, lunchboxes, and books, alongside board and card games.¹⁵ It also produced the Buckner & Garcia hit single “Pac-Man Fever,” which reached ninth on Billboard’s Hot 100 while the accompanying album climbed as high as 24th, and a Hanna-Barbera cartoon starring Marty Ingels as the voice of Pac-Man that ran on ABC from 1982 to 1984 and drew viewership ratings as high as 56 percent.¹⁵¹⁷ Companies later drew a broader lesson from the character’s success: that iconic franchise figures such as Pac-Man, Mario, or Sonic the Hedgehog were essential both to merchandising and to driving sales of new games and new consoles.¹⁵

The game was ported and re-released across numerous platforms in the decades that followed, including a Game Boy Color re-release packaged with Super Pac-Man and published by Namco on November 3, 1999.⁵ Home versions appeared for systems such as the Atari and Commodore 64, and the game has continued to circulate in home and mobile versions, including an HTML5 adaptation mirroring the original arcade version.¹³¹⁶