PAC-MAN (series)

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## General Information

### Composer

Toshio Kai
Shigeichi Ishimura
Bandai Namco Entertainment

### Developer

Atari
Gremlin Industries
Hamster Corporation
Bandai Namco

### Platform

Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, VIC-20, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, TI-99/4A, IBM PC, Game Boy, Game Gear, Game Boy Color, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Mobile phone, Game Boy Advance, iPod Touch, Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, Android

**PAC-MAN**, stylized as **Pac-Man** and originated as **Puck-Man** in Japan, is an adventurous maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls PAC-MAN as the default protagonist, who must devour all the PAC-Dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots, titled "Power Pellets," causes the ghosts to temporarily transform into blue and vulnerable, allowing PAC-MAN to nourish them for bonus points.

The game's development began in early 1979, directed by Toru Iwatani with a nine-man team. Iwatani wanted to create a game that could appeal to women as well as men, because most video games of the time had themes of war or sports. Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he rounded out the Japanese character for mouth, **kuchi** (口). The in-game characters were depicted to be cute and colorful for an appealing feeling to younger players. The original Japanese title of *Puck Man* was derived from the Japanese phrase "*paku paku taberu*," which refers to gobbling something up; the title was changed to *Pac-Man* for the North American release.

*Pac-Man* was a widespread critical and commercial success, leading to several sequels, merchandise, and two television series, as well as a hit single, "Pac-Man Fever," by Buckner & Garcia. After that, the character of PAC-MAN has become the official mascot of Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game remains one of the highest-grossing and best-selling games, generating more than $14 billion in revenue (as of 2016) and 43 million units in sales combined, and has an enduring commercial and cultural legacy, commonly listed as one of the greatest video games of all time.

## Gameplay

The original *PAC-MAN* game is set in a static, neon-colored maze, where the wedge-shaped PAC-MAN must traverse all corridors and lane at least once in order to eat every one of 244 dots distributed across the screen. Pac-Man is at constant risk from four differently-colored "ghosts" that roam the maze with the intention to collide into him, which will cost him a life. Each of the four ghosts have a unique method of targeting Pac-Man, giving them character beyond being simple enemies. Four of the dots in the maze are large, blinking Power Pellets. When PAC-MAN eats one of these, the ghosts temporarily turn blue and vulnerable, and will be briefly taken out of the game when Pac-Man collides with them in this state.

The point score — the ultimate objective of the game, like with several arcade games — increases with each dot that is eaten. The score can be further increased by eating the ghosts (with higher rewards for eating multiple ghosts in a row) or the Bonus Fruits that appear at certain thresholds twice in each round. When a maze is cleared, the board will be reset, and the next round will begin. As the rounds continue, the ghosts become faster and more aggressive, the Power Pellet's duration becomes shorter, and higher-valued fruits appear. After round 20, the game reaches its maximum difficulty, and essentially continues endlessly until the player runs out of lives, or reaches level 256, the bugged "kill screen," which cannot be cleared. When all levels are cleared perfectly, the maximum possible score is 3,333,360 points.

## Character

> *Main article: PAC-MAN*
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PAC-MAN is the titular main protagonist of the arcade video game series of the same name in 1980. His minimalist, yet iconic design was inspired by multiple sources: a rounded simplification of the Japanese character 口 (*kuchi*), meaning "mouth," a 1970s toyline by Tomy; and a pizza missing a single slice. His name is derived from the Japanese onomatopoeia ぱくぱく (*paku paku*), meaning to rapidly open and close one's mouth. Promotional artwork from Japan for the arcade game depicted PAC-MAN with a slightly more humanoid-like design, featuring limbs with orange gloves and red boots, as well as a long nose; this design would be refined overtime and subsequently featured in the games beginning with the 1984 arcade title *Pac-Land*.

As a character, PAC-MAN initially began with little traits of personality, reflecting his simplistic appearance in the games. Later installments in the franchise, such as the *Pac-Man World* series, expand on the character and his backstory. In these games, he is a considerate father with a large family that he deeply cares about, and he is characterized as a relatively laid-back hero who is willing to help wherever he is needed. Both of these traits were first established in Hanna-Barbera's *Pac-Man* cartoon series, which — unlike American multimedia adaptations of franchises, such as *Mario* and *Sonic* — was greatly influential to the *Pac-Man* universe and set the groundwork for most media that followed, thanks in part to a large portion of *Pac-Man* titles having been developed outside of the character's home country in Japan. His relationship with the ghosts — Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde — has also changed over the years: they have been depicted as archenemies, allies of circumstance, or even friendly rivals.

Due to his simplistic character, Pac-Man's personality can also vary between depictions — for instance, *Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures* portrays the character as an archetypal golden-age cartoon anti-hero who is drastically emotional and often selfish, requiring the player's intervention to succeed in his goals. *Pac-Man World 3* portrays Pac-Man as a flippant, sarcastic hero who is prone to cracking somewhat apprehensive puns and does not take the conflicts he faces seriously. The *Pac-Man & the Ghostly Adventures* franchise reinterprets the character as a naïve high-school student with a mysterious, tragic backstory. More modern promotional materials have shown an athletic and supportive side to the character. Regardless of appearance, he is typically shown to possess a ravenous appetite, owing to the original game's focus on devouring PAC-Dots and Bonus Fruit.

PAC-MAN also makes a major appearance as a playable character in the *Super Smash Bros.* series. PAC-MAN was briefly considered to be a playable character in *Super Smash Bros. Brawl*, under Shigeru Miyamoto's suggestion, but the idea was scrapped. The game's director, Masahiro Sakurai, thought PAC-MAN's inclusion would be too far-fetched at the time (in part due to thinking of PC-MAN's classic "wedge" shape, instead of the arms-and-legs design); however, he was later playable in *Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U* and *Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*, alongside the rest of the entire roster.

## Reception

Masaya Nakamura's company, Nakamura Amusement-machine Manufacturing Company (or NAMCO), founded an American subsidiary in 1978 to license its video arcade machines to companies in the United States. The same year, Namco released its first internally designed video arcade game, *Gee Bee*. Following this, Namco developed and released the highly popular fixed shooter game *Galaxian* in 1979 to compete with Taito Corporation's successful earlier game, *Space Invaders*. *Galaxian* revolutionized the arcade industry as the first game to use RGB-color graphics, and it and its 1981 sequel *Galaga* became fixtures in what was subsequently remembered as the "Golden Age of arcade video games" — the peak era of arcade video game popularity and technological innovation.

However, Namco's project in between, 1980's *Pac-Man*, would arguably become even more definitive of both the era and Namco's legacy. A young Namco employee named Toru Iwatani designed the game with the intention to appeal to a wider audience beyond young boys and teenagers — demographics that were typical of the time because of the prevalence of space shooter-themed arcade machines. He therefore fashioned a game out of maze-like elements and a colorful aesthetic with cute character designs, including a player character he originally named "Puckman" after the Japanese phrase ぱくぱく ("paku paku"), an onomatopoeia used to represent the sound of eating. In North America, the game was licensed by Midway Games (now NetherRealm Studios, a subsidiary of Warner Bros.); Midway renamed the character and the game itself *Pac-Man* for the North American release, as it was realized the original name could be vandalized to read a vulgar slang by changing the P into an F.

Despite its initially lukewarm reception in Japan, it is difficult to overstate the immense impact that the North American release of the game *Pac-Man* had. It quickly became far more popular than anything seen in the game industry up to that point, grossing over $1 billion in quarters within a decade, and towards the end of the 20th century, the game's total gross in quarters had been estimated at more than 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion), making it the highest-grossing video game of all time. It established the maze chase game genre, and is also credited for laying the foundations for the stealth genre due to its emphasis on avoiding enemies rather than fighting them; *Pac-Man* is often cited as an inspiration for the original *Metal Gear*.

It demonstrated the potential for character in video games; not only did the enemy ghosts have unique personalities in how they attacked, but Pac-Man himself was the first video game mascot (and is often argued to be the first distinctive video game character, at least outside of the text adventure genre). It was the first video game to feature power-ups, and is often credited as the first game to feature cutscenes, albeit not to the degree that Nintendo's own revolutionary arcade game, *Donkey Kong*, had the following year. Finally, it is one of the earliest games to become popular with a female audience, and this wide appeal allowed it to become gaming's first licensing success. Pac-Man was determined to have the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers.

*Pac-Man* became one of few games to have been consistently published for over four decades, with many remakes and sequels released on numerous platforms. This is not to mention the influx of unauthorized *Pac-Man* clones that took place soon after the original release, nor of the ill-fated port of the game for the Atari 2600 (which ironically was a contributing factor to the infamous North American 1983 video game crash, due to underpowered hardware and rushed development leading to poor sales and an oversaturated market).

One such unauthorized clone — a modification titled *Crazy Otto*, developed by General Computer Corporation — received attention from Midway, who subsequently licensed the game as an "official" *Pac-Man* sequel. With some changes to the character design, *Crazy Otto* became *Ms. Pac-Man*, which garnered a great deal of success of its own due to its improvements over the original title. Despite its development happening without Namco's consent, the company approved of the character and included the feminine take on *Pac-Man* in various *Pac-Man* compilations and ports. However, a series of legal and financial battles between Namco and several parties — primarily General Computer Corporation, its successors, and the company currently licensing from them, AtGames — have led to a dispute over who truly owns the character and who is owed royalties. This has resulted in a complete erasure of Ms. Pac-Man in recent years, with products featuring her being pulled from stores and different characters replacing her in re-releases.

As the series progressed with continued releases that explored different genres, the iconic yellow wedge shape that ordinarily defined the title character onscreen was phased out for a design closer to his appearance on the promotional artwork printed on the arcade machines themselves — an abstract, spherical humanoid with rudimentary limbs and a massive face with a stick-like nose that varied in length between appearances. This design was first seen in-game in the 1984 title *Pac-Land*, in part to tie in with a Hanna-Barbera animated series about Pac-Man that ran for two seasons in 1982 and 1983. *Pac-Land* is an innovative title in itself as one of the first side-scrolling platform games, and one of the first games to include parallax scrolling. It is considered a major foundation for later platformers, codified by 1985's *Super Mario Bros.*

The steady stream of *Pac-Man* games was more-or-less halted for roughly six years after *Pac-Mania* for the arcades in 1987, before resuming on consoles with *Pac-Attack* in 1993. Through releases on a variety of competing platforms, including the PC, the formerly maze-based series explored genres as varied as puzzle, adventure, platformer, party, racing, and even pinball. These games often introduced a colorful cartoon world, not unlike that of *Mario* and *Sonic*, and a wide variety of characters outside of the original cast of the arcade game, not the least of which were Pac-Man's wife and children. It could be argued that, as recently as the early 2010s, *Pac-Man* as a property was easily more relevant as a forerunner to modern video games than as a starring video game franchise, due to the tendency of these experimental *Pac-Man* games to cater to young child demographics and garner at-times mediocre reception, but Namco nonetheless continues to honor the character as its company mascot.

A new character design was formally introduced for *Pac-Man*'s 30th anniversary in 2010, beginning with *Pac-Man Party* and continuing through the computer-animated series *Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures*, which began airing in 2013. However, the rebooted franchise and its associated design was met with lukewarm reception, and in the meantime a new subseries had taken hold; the *Pac-Man Championship Edition* games, conceptualized by original game designer Toru Iwatani and initially released in 2007. Two other entries in this series, *Championship Edition DX* and *Championship Edition 2*, were released in 2010 and 2016 respectively, and overall marked a return to the classic maze gameplay and character designs associated with the series.

In an odd twist of fate, Pac-Man was involved both in another company's crossover fighting game — Capcom's *Street Fighter X Tekken*, wherein he was a playable character exclusively in PlayStation versions — and in the *Mario* series — as a playable racer in the *Mario Kart Arcade GP* series, racing arcade games developed jointly by Namco and Nintendo — before he was included for the first time as a playable fighter in Nintendo's *Super Smash Bros.* series of crossover fighting games in 2014, also a joint Nintendo-Namco effort. Inversely, Mario also made a cameo appearance in the *Pac-Man* series, acting as the announcer in the Nintendo-developed party title, *Pac-Man Vs.*, and so on.

## Trivia

* The *Pac-Man* universe is the oldest third-party universe with a playable character to be represented in *Smash*.
	+ Additionally, it is the second-oldest universe with a playable character overall, with only *Game & Watch* being older by just one month, as stated with Mr. Game & Watch.
* *Pac-Man* is the only third-party universe to have a game primarily developed by Nintendo, as *Pac-Man Vs.* has been developed by Nintendo EAD.
	+ It is also one of the three third-party universes to have a game published by Nintendo's rival Microsoft, the others being *Banjo-Kazooie* and *Minecraft*; it was included with the compilation *Return of Arcade*, and was even the game used in the trial version included with most copies of the Windows 95 CD.
* *Pac-Man*, *Sonic the Hedgehog*, and *Final Fantasy* are the only third-party universes to have had more than one stage.
* PAC-MAN's name is derived from "*Paku Paku*" (パクパク), a Japanese onomatopoeia for eating. More specifically, the figure-of-speech refers to opening and closing one's mouth several times, just as PAC-MAN himself does.
* Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the *Mario* and *Donkey Kong* franchises, has stated that PAC-MAN is his favorite video game character - even above Miyamoto's own creations.

## References

1. ↑ According to the Davie-Brown Index, Pac-Man and Mario have the highest brand awareness of any video game characters among consumers. Davie Brown Celebrity Index: Mario, Pac-Man Most Appealing Video Game Characters Among Consumers - PR Newswire.
2. ↑ https://sourcegaming.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/800/