The Life & Times Of Pac-Man
An appetite For Fun: The Life and Times Of The Pac Man
He’s been there for more than thirty years, entertaining a generation of arcade gamers in an era of “space invaders”. He’s round, yellow, and ever-smiling… oh, and yes, he’s Japanese. While planet earth was being seized by outer-space creatures and needed to be defended at ray-gun point, someone thought of an alternative. That someone happened to be videogames designer Toru Iwatani, from NAMCO enterprises, a Japan based game developer.
Turning American
It was the year 1979 and despite the pixilated naivety of the time, violence was the common thread in arcade games. Along came “Pakku Man”, as it was originally called back in Japan where it was first released, “pakku” being an onomatopoeic likeness of the sound it made when it opened his mouth. Soon after, their Japanese inventors decided to sort of “anglicize” the game’s name, by changing it to “Puck-Man”.
Later on, the name was definitely changed to the now renowned “Pac-man” when it was adopted by USA’s game developer MIDWAY, since North American distributors wanted to avoid any possible confusion between the word “puck” and the sometimes infamous “f” word when the game was released to the American market.
The premise of the game just couldn’t be any simpler: to “walk” your way as the Pac-Man through a seemingly endless chain of obscure pixilated labyrinths with the sole objective of feeding yourself up with the trail of dots, special items and occasional fruits in front of you, while at the same time avoiding any contact with “Shadow”, “Bashful”, “Pokey” and “Speedy”: the four hungry, yet somehow friendly ghosts trying to eat Pac-Man. This simplest of formulas made for one of the most successful games of all time, and an addictive one it was, for sure.
In fact, the game became so popular it was given its own television show back between 1982 and 1984. The game has also collected many a homage from within the video games industry, it’s trademark logo appearing in the most improbable scenarios, such as the corner of a Mortal Kombat fighting room, or a screen in the Tekken game, and also TV series like Futurama, South Park and Family Guy, just to name a few.
Pac Again
Everyone’s favorite yellow “smile” man will be making a triumphant return in an up to date new version from its original creator; according to NAMCO BANDAI sources, programmer Irokazu Yasuhara, one of the main responsibles of the success of SEGA’s emblematic “Sonic the Hedgehog” series, will perform as team lead for the project: “2010 marks his 30th anniversary, and we feel he deserves a comeback”, says NAMCO vice-president Makoto Imai.
“There weren’t any games for all audiences, back at the time, and specially no games that would be appealing to the feminine public”, Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani recalls, since his game was one of the first of its kind to achieve a massive feminine approval. Just ask mom, she’ll probably know what you’re talking about.
Pizza Pac
Legend has it that Iwatani’s primal inspiration for creating the dot-devouring Pac-Man came to him one day as he picked a slice from a pizza he had ordered just for himself. In fact, the whole game revolves around one sole, single-minded purpose: eating. “That’s a half-truth” says Iwatani, “Also; the Japanese ideogram Kuchi (the Japanese word for eating) is a squared symbol. It isn’t circular, like a pizza, but we decided to make it that way”.
As an appetizer while we wait for the game’s last incarnation, Pac-Man is available for playing online in a variety of gamers’ websites, in more than 200 variants of the original platform.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
PS. If you are not aware of Marcus Brigstocke’s (now) infamous remark about Pac-man here is a link to his own site summarising it…
[ http://www.marcusbrigstocke.com/pacman.asp ]
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“If Pacman had affected us as kids we’d be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.”
Ah! Bloody Pacman.
If only I weren’t so damn proud of that gag I would drop it from my set. It is no end of trouble, so many people have had it sent as a text or an e-mail that I can watch as the crowd splits into those who are laughing their asses off and those who are looking at me thinking - cheeky bastard he’s had that off the internet. I suppose that because it is part (and has been for years) of a much larger routine about games, children, behaviour, parenting, negative influences, violence etc etc, it would be easier to drop from my set.
It is my joke. I wrote it, then I took the rest of the day off as I was so chuffed with it. I am gutted that it has been claimed and passed around by so many people. Intellectual property law will not save me, the false claims will continue until I am man enough to give it all up. All I can say is - it seems that it is very unlikely that it was written by a Nintendo employee in 1989, being as Pac Man was still around and not much of a childhood memory, there were very few claims that gaming influenced childrens behaviour, and that the wording of it is identical to how it has been deliverd in my stand up routine for 6 years! For those that are interested it has also been atributed to Bill Gates, but then so has Windows! Bitter? Well perhaps just a little. It was sent to me by someone at Channel 4 a few years back after I did it on Channel 4 in a late night stand up show!
Hope that clears everything up.
Marcus
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