Day 4 History of Pac-Man, The Story Behind One of The Biggest Video Gaming Icons In History

Pac-Man is arguably one of the most successful video games. It is also one of the most iconic games in the whole world. Pac-Man is  an arcade game that was developed by Namco. Namco in short explanation is a Japanese corporation that got known when they were video game developing. Pac-Man was first released in Japan on May, 22, 1980, then released later that year in the United States.  Toru Iwatani, a Namco employee was hit with the idea of Pac-Man while eating pizza, which I've always found comical. The whole pizza was missing two slices, which gave him the idea of how Pac-Man would look visually. At first he called it Pakku-Man, which was the Japanese word for eating by the snapping of the mouth, which I thought was a cool interesting fact. Then he called it "Puck-Man" but later in 1980 changed it to Pac-Man to avoid "vandalism" to the P in "Puck". 


Everyone has at least played Pac-Man once or knows how the game play works, but avoiding assumptions I will just explain shortly how it works; One player controls Pac-Man, he maneuvers him through a maze collecting as many dots as possible. Power Pellets provide Pac-Man with the temporary ability to eat enemies that flash blue indicating they can be eaten. I thought the enemy details were amusing, each "ghost" has a nickname, Shadow/Binky, Speedy/Pinky, Bashful/Inky and Pokey/Clyde.

Pac-Man will always be a classic video game "Namco estimates that the original Pac-Man arcade title has been played more than ten billion times in its 20-year history. Namco's total Pac-Man revenues have reached $100 million... one quarter at a time." says   http://www.mameworld.info article "The History of Pac-Man: Pac-Facts". At the end of the 1990s it was estimated that Pac-Man made $2.5 Billion in quarters. When Pac-Man came in, the popular games at that moment were Asteroids and Space Invaders and Pong, none of which were as popular for Mainstream society like Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the landmark for video game history, which is why I wrote this article. It will always be one of my favorite classical arcade games of all time. 

Until Next Time!