Great Games: Pac-Man
NOTE: This piece was originally written during Pac-Man’s 35th anniversary in 2015
Pac-Man was probably one of the first games I’ve ever played on the computer. Most of the other computer games I had were of the educational sort. So Pac-Man served as a shameless diversion. The game features a round, yellow eater, the “Pac-Man”, who you navigate through a blue maze while he eats whatever can be found. Ghosts, the colors of cyan, red, pink, and orange, are also floating across the maze, and one touch from them will take you out. There are bigger pieces of food, that, if eaten, can temporarily render the ghosts vulnerable. The point is to earn as many points as possible before you earn a Game Over (and you will). I got bored of Pac-Man easily, since I often used the invincibility cheat, but it’s fond memory nonetheless.
Salon has said that Pac-Man was once as big as Star Wars. With merchandise ranging from steel lunchboxes to joke books. Pac-Man was a craze. The game was created by Japanese Namco designer Toru Iwatani, who was already famous for the first color video arcade game, Galaxian. Iwatani wanted to make a game that felt like a cartoon. While he was eating pizza, he took noticed that if you removed one slice from the pie, it look a head with an open mouth. His character originally being called “Puckman”, coming from the Japanese word pakupaku (to flap your mouth open and closed). The game quickly became hit, inciting a coin shortage in Japan and selling an unprecedented 100,000 units in America.
So just what is it about Pac-Man that makes it so popular? If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s the same appeal that Tetris had: simplicity. Virtually anyone can play Pac-Man; the controls are so easy. People like activities which are inclusive and have a low barrier of entry. It gives them a sense of confidence, that success is achievable to the everyman, not just the skilled. Salon attributes Pac-Man’s popularity (especially during the 80's), to a variety of factors, focusing a bit on the simplicity I previously mentioned,
“It was a thrill to be able to play Pac-Man and create your own cartoon; the action of the game echoed the theme of all the great Warner Bros. shorts: The chase. Add to that the fact that the game really wasn’t that hard. One quarter let a good player dominate the machine for a long time, and a Pac-Man novice could gain a sense of mastery after a couple of games. Even little kids could clear a screen or two without much difficulty. And though the design didn’t downplay its cuteness, that cuteness was always tempered by the abstraction that the game’s technical limitations required,”
Pac-Man was also an important force in expanding the scope of an arcade’s audience from just boys who like action games. Iwatani says at the time that, “In the late 1970s, there were a lot of games in arcades which featured killing aliens or other enemies that mostly appealed to boys to play. The image of arcades was that they were darkly lit and their restrooms were dirty.” This is a sentiment also shared by Salon,
“The game’s non-threatening complexion not only proved that video games could succeed and indeed thrive without spaceships and explosions, but in fact led to broader acceptance of the entire medium. Even into the late 1970s, the primary venues for video games were bars, pool halls and other hidey-holes of grown-up recreation. More than any other title, Pac-Man claimed video games for kids. Even the strictest parents could see the game’s appeal. So could the proprietors of snack bars, comic book stores, movie theaters and other social hubs of early-’80s kid life. Pac-Man took video games out of the bars and into the malls.”
Pac-Man was also helpful in broadening the appeal of video games to women. Iwatani said that he wanted “cute” characters that wouldn’t intimidate women and get more couples into arcades, “This perception [of arcades as dude hangouts] was similar in Japan. I wanted to change that by introducing game machines in which cute characters appeared with simpler controls that would not be intimidating to female customers and couples to try out … and couples visiting arcades would increase.” Iwatani was also quite clear in Pac-Man’s ability to make women feel empowered in games, “My opinion is that Pac-Man became popular with everyone, from youngsters to elders to men and women because of our original idea to make a game that spoke to both female customers and couples. Empowering Pac-Man to chase the ghosts gives players a refreshed perspective on the game’s core gameplay, and I think this idea also appeals to a new generation of female players who have grown up empowered and want to be the pursuer rather than being the pursued.”
This attempt to draw in female audiences would eventually culminate in Ms. Pac-Man, a game that many (including myself) consider to be superior to the original, which featured a female version of Pac-Man as the protagonist. While it may seem cheap to put a pink bow on Pac-Man to get the women involved, it’s worth remembering that these were the 1980’s, and such paltry offerings were common for the time. Though when female protagonists in better games during the age (Zelda, Mario, Donkey Kong) were regulated to “damsels-in-distress,” Ms. Pac-Man stood out a cut above the grain as a heroine in her own right.
Thirty-five years later, Iwatani believes that his pizza-inspired creation still stands tall,
“It might be a bit of a stretch to use a Beatles comparison, but if the song “Yesterday” is looked at as THE standard musical number for music, then I think Pac-Man is THE standard for games. Thus, Pac-Man will be loved forever, and I’m proud of that.”
