Pac-Man is one of the most recognisable brands in video gaming, and has appeared in his own TV show, board-games, collectible card series, casino slot machines, and even real-life re-enactments of the gameplay. Pac-Man has also left his mark in certain popular music tracks, and there is even rumoured to be a film on the way. The American arcade cabinet version has earned a place at the Washington DC Smithsonian museum as a cultural icon.

Pac-Man in action

Development began at Namco in 1979, taking a ten man team lead by Tōru Iwatani just over a year to complete the project. The game was simply based on the concept of eating, and its name derived from the onomatopoeic Japanese slang ‘paku-paku’ which describes the sound of a mouth repeatedly opened widely and then closed, or translates from the Japanese slang to mean ‘munch-munch.’ In an alternate universe we may all be playing Omnomnom-Man.

In an effort to appeal to a wider demographic, the maze elements were added. The four monsters (or ghosts, depending on your favoured version) were coded to each have unique AI, so as to add an extra layer of challenge to the game, and prevent it from becoming repetitive. The iconic character design was born out of a rounding of the Japanese character for “mouth” – Puck Man was born.

Puck Man arcade flyer

The original arcade version appeared on 22 May 1980 in Japan. It entered into a market captivated with the likes of Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pong derivatives and was met with average reception. The game was soon picked up by American company Midway, and introduced into a far more receptive American market.

Renamed as Pac-Man (apparently to avoid the embarrassing result of vandals changing the ‘P’ to an ‘F’) the game became a monster hit almost overnight in North America. Pac-Man went to outsell Asteroids as the best selling arcade game of the time, and sold over 350,000 cabinet units in total during its reign in the arcades.

Pac-Man arcade flyer

The first home console port of Pac-Man appeared on the Atari 2600, but was woefully inferior to the arcade version. In another example of Atari’s overambitious business ventures, 12 million cartridges were manufactured. At the time Atari only had an installed base of 10 million consoles, and assumed the new title would increase sales. They went on to sell 7 million cartridges, and incurred financial losses considered one of the contributing factors to the North American video game industry crash of 1983.

Atari 2600 Pac-Man port screenshot

Pac-Man has never looked back however, being consistently present in one way or another throughout his 30 year young life-span, ported to almost any gaming device one cares to imagine. Many illegal spin-offs were created, including the revered Ms. Pac-Man which was released by Midway. Namco sued Midway and eventually settled on an official license deal. Midway didn’t learn from their mistakes, and continued to release unlicensed spin-offs, resulting in Namco cutting ties with the company.

Fanatic followers of the game have gone so far as to reverse engineer the AI, exploit code bugs and learn the layouts of all 255 mazes in order to obtain that elusive perfect score. A perfect score is obtained by eating every dot, fruit, energizer and monster throughout the game, without losing a single life.

The first person recorded to have achieved the maximum score of 3 333 360 points is Billy Mitchell after a six hour session in July 1999. So far only six people can lay claim to this achievement, with the new record time to chase being 3 hours, 41 minutes and 22 seconds, set by David Race in September 2009.

Billy Mitchell commemoration at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show

Whilst the game should technically have no ending, a bug in the code causes the 256th level to render incorrectly, making the game unplayable. Whilst many have claimed they are able to surpass the 256th level “kill screen,” none have been able to demonstrate this feat.

Pac-Man kill screen

So goes the tale of a video gaming cultural icon. For those of you now itching to get a Pac-Man fix you can mosey on over to the official site where one can find various free Pac-Man based games, as well as the recent Google homage to the legend.

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