Pac-Man

Pac-Man is a maze video game developed by the Japanese firm Namco and designed by Toru Iwatani, first released in Japan in 1980 and distributed in the United States that same year by the Midway division of Bally.¹⁵¹³ The player guides a bright yellow, pie-shaped character through an enclosed maze, eating dots while avoiding four hunting ghosts, and eating power pills that briefly render the ghosts vulnerable so they can be consumed for bonus points.¹³¹⁵ It became one of the best-known arcade games in history and a cultural icon of the 1980s.¹⁵ Some accounts date the original design and Japanese development to 1979, with the public arcade release following in 1980.¹³

The game grew out of Iwatani’s deliberate reaction against the violent, space-themed shooters that dominated arcades at the close of the 1970s.¹⁵ He has cited Asteroids, Space Invaders, Tail Gunner, and Galaxian as the kind of shoot-em-up games he wanted to move away from.¹⁵ Iwatani has said his aim was to attract female players, who were then largely absent from a hobby he described as “a playground for boys” that was “dirty and smelly,” and to create something cleaner and brighter that would appeal to women and families.⁴ Because “girls love to eat desserts,” he built the entire design around the verb “eat,” a theme that runs through the dots, the fruit bonuses, and the power pellets.⁴ The design has been widely reported as inspired by the image of a pizza with a slice removed, and Iwatani has also described a simplified version of the Japanese character for “mouth,” kuchi, as a source.¹⁵²¹

The Japanese name was Puck-Man, from the onomatopoeic “paku-paku” (or “puck-puck”), an expression for munching akin to the American “munch munch”.⁴¹⁵ When the game reached the United States, a Midway official changed the title to Pac-Man to discourage vandals from altering the “P” of “Puck” into an obscenity.⁴ The original Puck Man was distributed in arcades under that name, with sales flyers surviving from markets including France, Germany, and Japan.⁷⁸

The maze holds 240 dots, and gameplay proceeds by clearing every dot and power pill on a board before advancing to the next, progressively harder level.¹⁵¹³ The player controls the character with a joystick or directional inputs, and beyond the dots may collect fruit bonuses worth extra points.¹⁵¹³ The power pellets were originally drawn in the shape of cookies.¹⁵

The four ghosts — Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (light blue), and Clyde (orange) — were each given distinct behavior rather than uniform pursuit.⁴¹⁵ According to Iwatani, only Blinky doggedly chases the player, while Pinky seeks a spot 32 pixels ahead of Pac-Man’s mouth, Inky aims for a similar fixed position, and Clyde moves largely at random, an arrangement designed to avoid the four ghosts simply trailing the player in a pack.⁴ In player lore the ghosts also carry nicknames — Blinky as “Shadow,” Pinky as “Speedy,” Inky as “Bashful,” and Clyde as “Pokey” — and Blinky accelerates once a certain number of dots have been eaten, a state players call “Cruise Elroy”.¹⁸ Iwatani has recounted that the president of Namco ordered him to make all the ghosts a single red color, fearing players would mistake some for allies; he refused, and player questionnaires showing that no tester preferred a single color eventually settled the matter.⁴ He has also said one abandoned idea was a movable shelter that would pinch and disfigure a pursuing ghost.⁴ The ghosts are never destroyed: when eaten, their impervious eyes float back home and regrow a body, part of the game’s largely nonviolent character.¹³

The original arcade version credited Iwatani with planning, Toshio Kai with sound, and Shigeo Funaki with programming.¹ The dot art and logos were the work of Namco graphic designer Hiroshi Ono, nicknamed “Mr. Dotman,” who joined the company in 1979 and also created the sprites for Galaxian, Galaga, Xevious, Dig Dug, and Rally-X.² Ono was known for tracing pixel sprites at different angles using a rotating stand; he later moved to Bandai Namco Games after the 2006 merger, went freelance in 2013, and died on October 16, 2021, aged 64, after a battle with autoimmune hepatitis.²

The game was first shown at a focus test on May 22, 1980, and released to the Japanese public in July; in June, before its public release, its game screen was displayed on the large outdoor monitor at Shinjuku ALTA, an unusual bit of video-game advertising for the time.¹ It reached the United States in the autumn of 1980, and within a year more than 100,000 units were sold.¹ By 1981 an estimated 250 million games were being played weekly in the United States alone, on roughly 100,000 machines.¹⁵ The game sold more than 350,000 arcade units during the 1980s, displacing earlier leaders such as Space Invaders and Asteroids, endured through the mid-decade industry slump, and in its first ten years grossed a reported $3.5 billion.¹³¹⁹

Pac-Man’s popularity spilled well beyond the arcade. Buckner & Garcia’s single “Pac-Man Fever” reached number nine on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1982, with its album climbing as high as 24th on the charts.¹¹³ A Hanna-Barbera animated series, with Marty Ingels voicing the title character, ran on the ABC television network from 1982 to 1984, at one point drawing viewership ratings as high as 56 percent.¹¹³ Licensed merchandise proliferated into toys, clothing, chalkboards, pillows, erasers, bubble pipes, lunchboxes, jewelry, and books, and the character was described in the United States as “the Mickey Mouse of the 80s”.¹¹³ A planned motion picture was never filmed.¹³ To mark the game’s thirtieth anniversary, Google published a playable Google Doodle on May 21, 2010.¹⁵

The game spawned an extensive line of sequels and spin-offs. Ms. Pac-Man?, developed in the United States in 1981 with a ribboned female character and an alternating maze design featuring two warp tunnels, proved even more successful in the U.S. than the original.¹ Super Pac-Man followed in Japan in 1982, replacing the dots with fruit and introducing a Super Power Pellet that turned the character invincible, along with the series’ first cameo bonus stage.¹ A 1983 entry introduced a new character, “Mil,” which moved fruit away from Pac-Man and did away with power pellets entirely.¹ Later entries diverged in genre: Pac-Land (1984) was a side-scrolling platformer in which Pac-Man escorts a lost fairy back to Fairyland, Pac-Mania (1987) rendered the maze in 3D and let Pac-Man jump over ghosts, and the Pac-Man World series brought the character to the Sony PlayStation from 1999.¹¹⁹ Pac-Man Championship Edition, released for the Xbox 360 in 2007, updated the formula with fast-paced play.¹⁹ In 2011 Iwatani presented a design postmortem on the game at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.⁴

The character’s endurance helped establish the value of the recognizable franchise mascot in video games, a lesson later companies applied to figures such as Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog.¹³ Pac-Man has since been ported to nearly every gaming platform — home consoles, handhelds, and personal computers — and is preserved in institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which acquired the 1980 game as part of its collection.⁹¹³ Bandai Namco marked the game’s forty-fifth anniversary in 2025, promoting Pac-Man as one of the most recognized video game characters and staging commemorative exhibits and events.¹⁷