![]() ![]() It featured the first "power-up" - the big pill that made ghosts vulnerable - and the first cut scenes, the small animated sequences between one level and the next. "Pac-Man" pioneered a number of innovations in gameplay and game design. Although the titular character did somewhat resemble a hockey puck, the game's American distributor, Midway, feared that kids would scrape off the marquee, changing the "P" to an "F." After its name was changed, the game became an instant hit, with nearly 300,000 units sold worldwide from 1981 to 1987. When the game was imported into the US, however, the name "PuckMan" was deemed inappropriate. While drawing up ideas for a game based around food, Iwatani grabbed a slice of pizza from a box and had an epiphany: The remaining pizza slices formed Pac-Man's shape, and the rest was history (or so the story goes, according to Iwatani). "But then I thought - and this may have been presumptuous of me - that women also enjoy the act of eating, or 'taberu' in Japanese, and that's how I found myself centered around this keyword and the act of eating as a concept." "I had started off assuming that themes like fashion and romance might be best suited for a female audience," said Iwatani. "Paku paku taberu" is a popular Japanese phrase for gobbling something up, with "paku paku" mimicking the sound of a snapping mouth and "taberu" meaning "to eat." The game wasn't called "Pac-Man" back then, but rather "PuckMan," which offers a glimpse into its origins. There was little indication that his next project would change video game history forever.Īnd yet, when the first "Pac-Man" machine was placed in an arcade in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya district on May 22, 1980, it did exactly that. His first title, 1978's "Gee Bee," was essentially a digital version of pinball and wasn't particularly successful. He was just 25, and preferred working on pinball machines, not video games. What I wanted to do was make arcades into livelier places that women and couples might enjoy visiting, so I thought it best to design a game with women in mind." "They were gloomy places where only boys went to hang out. "When I started drafting up this project in the late 1970s, the arcades were filled with violent games all about killing aliens," said Iwatani, who was working for Japanese games firm Namco at the time. Though video games were a relatively new medium, the recipe for success at the time was already well-established: People wanted to shoot things.īut the creator of "Pac-Man," a young game designer named Toru Iwatani, wanted to try something completely different. The colors also helped represent the ghosts' differing personalities.(CNN) - When "Pac-Man" debuted in Tokyo 40 years ago, no one could have predicted it would become the most successful arcade game of all time. The choice to make them all different colors was once again about appealing to women, as he told Wegotone. This again helped separate Pac-Man from the games that stereotypically appealed to men, which often included fierce and terrifying monsters.įor these wholesome ghosts, Iwatani was inspired by the likes of Obake no Q-Taro and Casper The Friendly Ghost. He told GameSpot that the idea was to create antagonists who were more cute than scary. ![]() The ghosts, however, were not based on food shapes. ![]() The said symbol is a square, but he made it round. Yet during the talk with Susan Lammers, he also says part of the design came from the Japanese symbol for mouth (aka Kuchi). In an interview with GameInformer, he said, "I was eating a whole pizza while I was thinking about making a game themed after 'eating.' It was then that I came up with Pac-Man’s game design after looking at the pie with a slice taken from it." Toru Iwatani has always claimed that he came up with the design for Pac-Man while eating pizza. ![]()
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