Tōru Iwatani

Tōru Iwatani (岩谷徹) is a Japanese video game designer best known as the creator of the 1980 arcade game Pac-Man?, one of the most popular arcade games of all time.⁴ He spent much of his career at Namco? and, in 2009, was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.¹³

Iwatani was born on January 25, 1955, in the Meguro Ward of Tokyo, Japan.¹¹³ He was entirely self-taught, without formal training in computers, visual arts, or graphic design.¹⁴ In 1977, at the age of 22, he joined Namco Ltd, a Tokyo computer software company that produced video games.¹⁴

Namco’s main product lines at the time were projection-based amusement rides and light-gun shooting galleries, and Iwatani had expected his job to involve pinball machines, only to be initially disappointed at being assigned to work on video games instead.⁴ His first designs reflected that pinball background: Gee Bee (1978) was a heavily pinball-inspired paddle game, followed by Bomb Bee and Cutie Q, both released in 1979.⁴⁵ Later accounts, drawing on Iwatani’s own recollections, place him as a young Namco employee of about 27 when the concept for Pac-Man began to take shape.²⁰

Pac-Man

Iwatani conceived his next game against a backdrop dominated by violent titles; he observed that the arcades of the era were seen as dark, scary places frequented only by men, and believed there would be no future for them unless women and couples also came in.¹⁵⁴ Iwatani has said that all the computer games available at the time were of the violent type — war games and Space Invaders imitators — with nothing that women in particular could enjoy.⁴ His goal was for game centers to shed their sinister image for a lighter atmosphere, and he judged that the key was to attract girls.⁴⁵ He chose “eating” as the underlying theme and designed a game that did not focus on conflict, describing his aim as a “comical” game that everyone could enjoy.⁴

By his own often-repeated account, the visual inspiration came at lunch when he removed a wedge from a whole pizza, leaving a shape that suggested his central character.¹⁴⁵ Iwatani has said the pizza story is “half true,” noting that the Japanese character for mouth (kuchi) is a square shape that he decided to round out.⁴ He deliberately kept the character as simple as possible, without eyes or limbs, rejecting a suggestion to add eyes on the grounds that features would proliferate endlessly, and preferring to leave the image to each player’s imagination.⁴ Iwatani has said game design in his practice often began with words: he started from the Japanese verb “taberu,” to eat, playing with the term and sketching in his notebook.⁴ In an early version he had scattered food across the whole screen but realized players would not understand what to do, so he created a maze and placed the food within it to make the purpose clear.⁴

The character was colored yellow because Iwatani considered it a peaceful, neutral color representing neither friend nor foe, and he later resisted proposals to recolor it even for multiplayer variants such as Pac-Man VS..¹⁵ The name derived from the Japanese onomatopoeia “paku paku,” the sound of chomping, and the game was first titled “Puck-Man”.¹⁵⁴ Iwatani has recalled that the name was finalized as “Puckman” fairly quickly during meetings, and that game titles at Namco were typically settled around the point when a project was about half complete.¹⁵

Iwatani developed the game with a small team that included the programmer Shigeo Funaki and Toshio Kai on sound and music, along with a hardware engineer and a cabinet designer, taking it from concept to finished product over roughly a year and five months.⁴¹ The four ghosts — known outside Japan as Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde — were designed to be colorful so as to be harder to hate, and moved in four distinct behavioral patterns rather than at random, an approach regarded as an advance in arcade game artificial intelligence.¹⁵⁵ Iwatani conceived the ghosts’ behavior as a wave, attacking then dispersing and regrouping so that a human player would not feel constantly besieged, with the peaks and valleys of the pattern flattening as time went on so the ghosts pressed more frequently.¹ Iwatani also planned from the outset to merchandise the character, sewing stuffed toys himself and making iron-on t-shirts during the planning phase, and the game’s cabinet carried an illustration of the character on its side panels — which he described as the first time a video game used a character as part of the cabinet design.¹⁵

“Puck-Man” was released to the Japanese public on May 22, 1980, where it became a major success.⁴ Iwatani has said that when he visited arcades after the release he saw the crowds of excited girls and couples the team had hoped for.¹⁵ The American arcade manufacturer Midway bought the U.S. rights and released it as “Pac-Man,” reportedly renaming it for fear that children would deface a “Puck-Man” cabinet by altering the letter “P”.⁴⁵ The property later spread into a U.S. animated cartoon, which Iwatani said reached a viewer rating as high as 56 percent, and into merchandise ranging from ties to telephones to golf balls.¹⁵ Iwatani has said he received no personal reward for the game’s success: “There was no change in my salary, no bonus, no official citation of any kind,” describing himself as simply an employee.⁴

Later career and teaching

After Pac-Man, Iwatani went on to design other games, and has named his personal favorite as Libble Rabble, a 1983 game he worked on immediately afterward.¹⁴ He rose within Namco, becoming a leading producer on arcade titles including Ridge Racer, Time Crisis, and Pole Position, and eventually took on administrative responsibilities within the company.⁵⁴¹⁴

In April 2005 he began teaching Character Design Studies at the Osaka University of Arts as a visiting professor.⁴⁵ He had participated in 2004 in a series of lectures on game planning that Namco ran in conjunction with Tokyo Polytechnic University, after which he began lecturing regularly at several universities.⁶ In 2007 he developed Pac-Man Championship Edition for the Xbox 360, which he stated would be the final game he developed.⁴¹⁴ That same year he left Namco to become a full-time lecturer at Tokyo Polytechnic University, explaining that he thought it more important to pass on the know-how accumulated over the previous 30 years to the next generation.⁵⁶

In an interview in Weekly Famitsu, Iwatani warned that career training in the Japanese games industry was “on the verge of crisis” and that Japan lagged behind the United States, Europe, Korea, and China in game education.⁶ He argued that the evolution of hardware had made in-house training far harder and that educational institutions would have to take up the work, and hoped other veteran designers would help train the next generation.⁶ He emphasized that game development is a group activity in which communication is crucial, while also requiring the assertiveness of a creative process, and said he hoped to foster in his students a balance between the two.⁶

Iwatani made a cameo appearance in the 2015 film Pixels, briefly seen during the introduction repairing a Pac-Man arcade machine.¹⁶¹⁴ In the film a fictionalized professor version of the character, played by Denis Akiyama, reaches out to a giant Pac-Man and has his hand chomped off.³ He holds a Guinness World Record for Pac-Man as the most-installed coin-operated arcade machine worldwide, with nearly 300,000 units.¹⁴

Toru Iwatani - Origin of Pac ManCritical Path