What Die-Hard Gamers Don't Even Know About Pac-Man

Pac-Man is a unique cultural artifact.
He's as minimal and enigmatic as a hieroglyph, but has the power to banish ghosts from endless
mazes using nothing but pep pills and his gigantic, body-sized mouth.
Is Pac-Man an unholy terror?
A faceless critique of capitalist ennui?
Or is he just a guy who's hungry for sweet, sweet ghost bodies?
Here's a look at the strange history of video games' most beloved yellow circle.
"Pac-Man just gives me this feeling of giddiness.
Like there's all these tingles running up and down my nipples!"
Puckman
Originally, Pac-Man was simply "Puckman," and not because he bears a striking resemblance
to a hockey puck.
The word 'puck' is based on a Japanese onomatopoeia for eating, 'pakku pakku', which is basically
the Japanese equivalent of 'chomp chomp'.
"Oh, I just remembered, I'm allergic to shrimp"
However, when the game's arcade cabinets made their way to the US, 'Puckman' was changed
over concerns the cabinet could be easily vandalized to say something much more rude.
Let's be honest, the temptation to scratch a little paint off of that 'P' is very is
real.
Pizza power
"And then all those ghosts turned blue, boo.
Then Pac-Man eats them all too!"
Eating stuff is the main goal of Pac-Man.
You see it, you eat it: power pellets, ghosts, and bonus fruits are no match for your relentless
chompers.
This focus on eating was intentional from the start, and it had a surprising goal.
The game's creator, Toru Iwatani, observed that arcades had exclusively become playgrounds
for boys, with games focusing on spaceships and shooting aliens, generally creating a
dark, gloomy environment.
Iwatani wanted to make arcades more accessible to more people.
He told WIRED,
"When you think about things that women like, you think about fashion, or fortune-telling
or food or dating boyfriends.
So I decided there should be a game around eating.
After eating dinner, women like to have dessert.
If you take a pizza and remove one piece, it looks like a mouth.
That was where my idea came from."
As strange and stereotypical as those ideas were, it worked.
Making the colorful characters cute, and using colors that would visually pop changed the
usual late-'70s arcade look.
Ultimately, the driving force behind the project was the idea that girls just wanted to have
fun… and eat a lot.
Crazy Otto
Behind the scenes of Ms. Pac-Man's traditional marriage into the Pac Family was an uneasy
union between video game company Midway and a group of MIT dropouts.
While Kevin Curran and Doug Macrae were attending MIT, they made side money off of arcade games
they had set up in the dorms.
Being MIT students, they began to propose ways to improve both the games and their profits
— and making games harder was the ideal solution.
They created acceleration kits to make certain games run faster, starting with Atari's Missile
Command.
When that modification proved to be profitable in confines of their dorms, they began selling
it to arcades.
With the money they made, they formed the General Computer Corporation, and moved on
to similarly "improving" Pac-Man.
They changed many of the mechanics of Pac-Man gameplay by randomizing enemy movement and
creating multiple, varied mazes.
To avoid copyright issues, they created a new title character, which they described
as "Pac-Man but with legs and cold lizard-like eyes" named Crazy Otto.
The enemies were … butts?
Apples?
During the developement of Crazy Otto, Atari sued Curran and Macrae for infringing on their
Missile Command copyright, but the case ultimately settled out of court when Atari hired General
Computer Corporation to work for them instead, making games like Food Fight.
Once the dust cleared, GCC contacted Midway, the owners of Pac-Man, to see if they were
interested in buying the Crazy Otto kit for their arcade cabinets.
Seeing how the case with Atari turned out, Midway made a deal with GCC to be the exclusive
distributor of the kits, but also hired them to create a meaner, faster version of Pac-Man,
which became Ms. Pac-Man.
"Honey, don't ya know , I'm more than Pac-Man with a bow!"
Pac-Man Fever and beyond
The 1980s were time when two grown men could dress up like disco hoboes and write a throwaway
novelty single about an arcade game, and it would crack the US Billboard Top Ten.
"Cause I got PAC MAN FEVER, PAC MAN FEVER!
It's drivin' me crazy, drivin' me crazy!
Buckner & Garcia's original single for "Pac-Man Fever" was self-produced, but quickly caught
the attention of CBS Records, who requested a whole album of similar material.
They cranked out an album of eight tracks in a few weeks.
To follow-up their single success and fill the rest of the album, the duet focused on
Frogger, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Berzerk, Defender, and the obscure game Mousetrap.
The album sold two million copies, but their second single, "Do The Donkey Kong," failed
to make an impression like Pac-Man Fever did.
The band faded for a while, until a wave of late '90s nostalgia for the band saw them
reunite to release an album of new material about, Mr. T, E.T. and pogs.
No word on whether or not they have plans to cover ALF.
Pac-madness
After Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man fever reached new heights of delirium, and the franchise's video
game spinoffs and sequels got really...weird.
Which is saying something.
Super Pac-Man included features that creator Toru Iwatani wanted to include in the original:
stuff like locked doors, and a power-up that makes Pac-Man twice his size.
Baby Pac-Man confusingly alternated play between an arcade game and a pinball machine.
Jr. Pac-Man had scrolling mazes.
Professor Pac-Man was an educational puzzle game because... who knows why.
Pac & Pal allowed Pac-Man to shoot freeze rays and belch smoke, and was followed around
by a friendly green female ghost.
Pac-Land was a platformer that had graphics inspired by the animated cartoon series.
Later Pac games incorporated 3-D, virtual reality, and whatever other novelty bells
and whistles they could squeeze in, forgetting that the original appeal of Pac-Man was in
its minimal simplicity.
We've yet to see a gritty first-person shooter Pac-Man, but it's surely just a matter of
time.
But when it came to weird Pac-spinoffs, these were just the beginning.
Pac-Man goes Hollywood
The ubiquitous yellow orb was popular enough by 1982 to have earned his own Saturday morning
cartoon show, which lasted for about a year.
"PACMAN"
Pac-Man players know that the game doesn't exactly have a narrative or an origin story,
so the cartoon show just went wild.
Ignoring Pac-Man's pixelated paramour, the animated series introduced Pepper Pac-Man
as the hero's wife, gave them a baby, and made them fight against the evil Mezmaron.
But things get even weirder.
2013's Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures starts out with hoverboards, hip modern teen
versions of the characters… and hints of a horrifying war, from which Pac-Man is the
only survivor of a genocide against the yellow pac people by the evil Lord Betrayus.
The maze is some sort of afterworld labyrinth, which Pac-Man enters in search of his probably-dead
parents, Zac and Sunny, who are possibly the original Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.
That's right: the original Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are dead.
And he also has to protect the Tree of Life.
And those butt-monsters from Crazy Otto?
They're kinda back.
What was wrong with just eating pellets?
World Records
How successful and iconic is Pac-Man?
Well, it holds two world records.
Officially, Pac-Man holds the Guinness World Record for "Most Recognizable Video Game Character,"
just barely placing above Mario, and "Most Successful Coin-Operated Arcade Game."
And that's not to mention all the other records Guinness has documented involving Pac-Man,
like Billy Mitchell's infamous "Perfect Game".
"They said there's been ten billion games played how are you going to do it?
I says, cause I'm Billy Mitchell."
"Boo!"
"Oh boo yourselves!"
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What Die-Hard Gamers Don't Even Know About Pac-Man

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