42 Facts About Pac-Man

Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades.

The character of Pac-Man is the mascot and flagship icon of Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Pac-Man is an action maze chase video game; the player controls the eponymous character through an enclosed maze.

When Pac-Man eats all of the dots, the player advances to the next level.

Pac-Man can eat blue ghosts for bonus points; when a ghost is eaten, their eyes make their way back to the center box in the maze, where the ghost "regenerates" and resumes their normal activity.

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Pac-Man created Namco's first video game Gee Bee in 1978, which while unsuccessful helped the company gain a stronger foothold in the quickly-growing video game industry.

Pac-Man assisted in the production of two sequels, Bomb Bee and Cutie Q, both released in 1979.

Pac-Man's game was initially called Pakkuman, based on the Japanese onomatopoeia term “paku paku taberu”, referencing the mouth movement of opening and closing in succession.

Game that later became Pac-Man began development in early 1979 and took a year and five months to complete, the longest ever for a video game up to that point.

Frank Fogleman, the co-founder of Gremlin Industries, believes that the maze-chase gameplay of Pac-Man was inspired by Sega's Head On, a similar arcade game that was popular in Japan.

Iwatani has often claimed that the character of Pac-Man himself was designed after the shape of a pizza with a missing slice while he was at lunch; in a 1986 interview he said that this was only half-truth, and that the Pac-Man character was based on him rounding out and simplifying the Japanese character “kuchi”, meaning “mouth”.

Pac-Man was inspired by the television series Casper the Friendly Ghost and the manga Obake no Q-Taro.

Pac-Man was ported to a plethora of home video game systems and personal computers; the most infamous of these is the 1982 Atari 2600 conversion, designed by Tod Frye and published by Atari.

Pac-Man was one of four titles released under the Arcade Game Series brand, which was published for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC in 2016.

Pac-Man is included in many Namco compilations, including Namco Museum Vol.

Pac-Man eventually became very successful in Japan, where it went on to be Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1980 according to the annual Game Machine charts, dethroning Space Invaders which had topped the annual charts for two years in a row and leading to a shift in the Japanese market away from space shooters towards action games featuring comical characters.

Pac-Man was America's highest-grossing arcade game of 1981, and second highest game of 1982.

The game's success was partly driven by its popularity among female audiences, becoming "the first commercial videogame to involve large numbers of women as players" according to Midway's Stan Jarocki, with Pac-Man being the favorite coin-op game among female gamers through 1982.

Pac-Man topped the US RePlay cocktail arcade cabinet charts for 23 months, from February 1982 through 1983 up until February 1984.

Pac-Man was awarded "Best Commercial Arcade Game" at the 1982 Arcade Awards.

Pac-Man won the Video Software Dealers Association's VSDA Award for Best Videogame.

In 2001, Pac-Man was voted the greatest video game of all time by a Dixons poll in the UK.

Pac-Man is considered by many to be one of the most influential video games of all time; The game established the maze chase game genre, the first video game with power-ups, and the individual ghosts have deterministic artificial intelligence that reacts to player actions.

Pac-Man is considered one of the first video games to have demonstrated the potential of characters in the medium; its title character was the first original gaming mascot, it increased the appeal of video games with female audiences, and it was gaming's first broad licensing success.

Pac-Man was a turning point for the arcade video game industry, which had previously been dominated by space shoot 'em ups since Space Invaders.

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Pac-Man popularized a genre of "character-led" action games, leading to a wave of character action games involving player characters in 1981, such as Nintendo's prototypical platform game Donkey Kong, Konami's Frogger and Universal Entertainment's Lady Bug.

Pac-Man was one of the first popular non-shooting action games, defining key elements of the genre such as "parallel visual processing" which requires simultaneously keeping track of multiple entities, including the player's location, the enemies, and the energizers.

Pac-Man inspired 3D variants of the concept, such as Monster Maze, Spectre, and early first-person shooters such as MIDI Maze (1987; which had similar character designs).

Many post-Pac-Man titles include power-ups that briefly turn the tables on the enemy.

On June 3, 2010, at the NLGD Festival of Games, the game's creator, Toru Iwatani, officially received the certificate from Guinness World Records for Pac-Man having had the most "coin-operated arcade machines" installed worldwide: 293, 822.

The "Pac-Man renormalization" is named for a cosmetic resemblance to the character, in the mathematical study of the Mandelbrot set.

The game's popularity has led to "Pac-Man" being adopted as a nickname, such as by boxer Manny Pacquiao and the American football player Adam Jones.

Wide variety of Pac-Man merchandise have been marketed with the character's image.

Pac-Man character appears in the film Pixels, with Denis Akiyama playing series creator Toru Iwatani.

Pac-Man is referenced and makes an appearance in the 2017 film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

Various attempts for a feature film based on Pac-Man have been planned since the peak of the original game's popularity.

In 2022, plans for a live-action Pac-Man film were revived at Wayfarer Studios, based on an idea by Chuck Williams.

Pac-Man inspired a long series of sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings, and is one of the longest-running video game franchises in history.

Pac-Man, developed by the American-based General Computer Corporation and published by Midway in 1982.

Pac-Man is one of the best-selling arcade games in North America, where Pac-Man and Ms.

Pac-Man had become the most successful machines in the history of the amusement arcade industry.

Pac-Man to become owned by Namco, who assisted in production of the game.