40 YEARS OF PAC- MAN
AS THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS MUNCHER CELEBRATES HIS BIRTHDAY, GARETH MAY EXPLORES THE JAPANESE EXPORT AND VIDEO GAME PUBLISHER NAMCO’S CLASSIC COIN-OP
EAT it, Batman – how’s this for an origin story? The adorable mascot we now know as Pac-Man was inspired by pizza. Namco programmer Toru Iwatani was taking a slice from a box when he noticed how the remaining pie looked like a smiley face. Pac-Man was born – and with him a cultural phenomenon that transcended video games then and still does now.
The eponymous muncher debuted in an arcade cabinet in Japan on May 22, 1980. But Pac-Man, which saw players guide the greedy glob around a maze, trying to eat dots and avoid four gnarly ghosts, wasn’t an instant hit in his homeland. Five months later, in North America, however, the world began to go gaga for the hungry yellow orb. By 1982, 400,000 cabinets had been sold in the US alone, generating oodles of cash for both Namco and American distributor Midway.
The game would go on to take more than $2.5billion by the ’90s, making it one of the highest-grossing video games of all time and a household name the globe over.
PAC-WHO?
Pac-Man’s fame is no accident. Gaming’s first truly famous face was a purpose-built trailblazer. Unlike other rival arcade cabinets of the time such as Space Invaders and Asteroids, Pac-Man was the antithesis of devastation and destruction. Rather than ask players to blow things up, they were encouraged to eat their way to victory, which was an innovative break from the shoot-’em-up style popular at the time.
Unlike his black-and-white predecessors, Pac-Man was a colourful, appealing, feelgood character – even the pesky ghosts were cute cannon fodder.
Pac-Man successfully broke through generational and gender boundaries to appeal to a wider audience and has gone on to become a globally recognised symbol of play. That’s not just down to looks, though. Peek beneath the fuzzy lights and there’s a lot more going on.
As a game, Pac-Man is both that rare blend of accessibility and elitism. The simple movement mechanic of left, right, up, down means gamers of all skill levels can easily pick it up and yet
Pac-Man equally covets the attention of serious hardcore high-score hunters.
A ‘perfect game’ in Pac-Man constitutes a total max score of 3,333,360. That includes a feast of every dot, power-up pellet, fruit bonus and scaredy-cat blue ghost, across all 256 levels. It’s not easy. More people have orbited the moon than have managed to do it.
Throw in the earliest occasion of stealth mechanics (ie, avoiding the baddies in order to achieve your goals) and the emphasis on collecting things (the original completist’s video game), and it’s easy to see why Pac-Man popularised electronic fun in the 1980s and beyond.
POPULAR PAC
Pac-Man’s video-game legacy is clear for all to see but what’s even more remarkable is his staying power beyond the joystick. Unlike Mario, Sonic and Lara Croft, Pac-Man rose above the gaming world almost instantly and continues to operate in that rarefied zone between niche and popular culture.
In the early ’80s the cult of Pac-Man led to the creation of a cartoon produced by HannaBarbera (aired from 1982 to 1983), as well as merchandise that spanned T-shirts, mugs, stickers, board games, belt buckles, wind-up toys, wrapping paper, PJs, cereal and lunch boxes. The craze was captured in top 40 novelty song Pac-Man Fever by Buckner & Garcia (the American equivalent of Chas & Dave). And Pac-Man still feeds off fame from an entirely new generation of fans. In 2008, the Davie-Brown Celebrity Index (DBI) of consumer insights found 94 per cent of American consumers recognised Pac-Man over Dolly Parton and Matt Damon. Less popular than pixels? Oh boy. The glowing greedster continues to garner adoration. In 2010, Google Doodle featured Pac-Man to mark the 30th anniversary of its release, while Pac-Man’s 35th birthday was marked with Sony Pictures’ Pixels, starring Adam Sandler. This year, for the 40th anniversary, we’ll be getting a brand new Tamagotchi, a theme song called Join The PAC by techno artist Ken Ishii, a raft of new Pac-Man collectibles and a website dedicated to global celebrations (pacman.com). All that proves the world still has an appetite for the first celebrity of video-gaming culture.