Pac-Man — stories left

In 1978 Namco put on sale Gee Bee, its first original video game, which combined a block breaker with a shooting game.

This was also the first time that Namco held a private show before release.

Pac-Man as a character is said to be "the world's first case of a video game protagonist beginning to walk on its own as a character", and from its birth to the present day it has been treated as the corporate icon of Namco (now Bandai Namco Holdings).

He 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.

Iwatani has often claimed that the character of Pac-Man was inspired by the shape of a pizza with a missing slice that he observed at lunch, but in a 1986 interview, he said that this was only partially true and that the character's appearance was also the result of rounding and simplifying the Japanese character kuchi, meaning "mouth".

Namco released a version for the Family Computer in 1984 as one of the console's first third-party titles, as well as a port for the MSX computer.

In 2001, Namco released a port of Pac-Man for various Japanese mobile phones, being one of the company's first mobile game releases.

Hamster Corporation released the arcade version of Pac-Man (alongside Xevious) as part of their Arcade Archives series for the Nintendo Switch in September 2021 and PlayStation 4 in October 2021, marking the first of two Namco games to be included as part of the series.

Upon its North American debut at AMOA 1980, the game initially received a mild response.

Play Meter magazine previewed the game and called it "a cute game which appears to grow on players, something which cute games are not prone to do," saying that there's "more to the game than at first appears" but criticized the sound as a drawback, saying it is "good for awhile, then becomes annoying.

When it was first released in Japan, Pac-Man was initially only a modest success; Namco's own Galaxian (1979) had quickly outdone the game in popularity because its predominately male player base was familiar with its shooting gameplay as opposed to Pac-Mans cute characters and maze-chase theme.

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.

Among the nine arcade games covered by How to Win Video Games (1982), Pac-Man was the only one with females accounting for a majority of players.

It is often cited as the first game with cutscenes (in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and Blinky chasing each other), though actually Space Invaders Part II employed a similar style of between-level intermissions in 1979.

Pac-Man inspired 3D variants of the concept, such as Monster Maze (1982), Spectre (1982), and early first-person shooters such as MIDI Maze (1987; which had similar character designs).

The first person to achieve a publicly witnessed and verified perfect score without manipulating the game's hardware to freeze play was Billy Mitchell, who performed the feat on July 3, 1999.

Yee received a letter from United States president Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a world record score of 6,131,940 points, possible only if he had passed level 256.

After announcing in 2018 that it would no longer recognize the first perfect score on Pac-Man, Guinness World Records reversed that decision and reinstated Billy Mitchell's 1999 performance on June 18, 2020.

The first of these was Ms. Pac-Man, developed by the American-based General Computer Corporation and published by Midway in 1982.

In an interview in 2020 Iwatani said that this is not so much "being eaten" as "being bitten and getting away", and he likened the relationship between Pac-Man and the ghosts to Tom and Jerry.

Stanley Jarocki, vice president of Midway, said on a news program, "Our company owns the Mickey Mouse of the 80s."

Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he rounded out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi ().

Iwatani has often claimed that the character of Pac-Man was inspired by the shape of a pizza with a missing slice that he observed at lunch, but in a 1986 interview, he said that this was only partially true and that the character's appearance was also the result of rounding and simplifying the Japanese character kuchi, meaning "mouth".

The game's title was also changed because Namco executives worried that vandals would change the "P" in Puck Man to an "F".

The same year, Namco and SNK co-published a port for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which came with a circular "Cross Ring" that attached to the d-pad to restrict it to four-directional movement.

In 1996, it was re-released for arcades as part of Namco Classic Collection Vol. 2, alongside Dig Dug, Rally-X and special "Arrangement" remakes of all three titles.

Play Meter magazine previewed the game and called it "a cute game which appears to grow on players, something which cute games are not prone to do," saying that there's "more to the game than at first appears" but criticized the sound as a drawback, saying it is "good for awhile, then becomes annoying.

Reviewing home console versions in 1982, Games magazine called the Atari 5200 implementation a "splendidly reproduced" version of the arcade game, noting a difference in maze layouts for the television screen.

It considered the Atari 2600 version to have "much weaker graphics", but to still be one of the best games for that console.

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.

In a 1983 interview, Nakamura said that though he did expect Pac-Man to be successful, "I never thought it would be this big.

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

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 Donkey Kong, Konami's Frogger and Universal Entertainment's Lady Bug.

Guinness World Records has awarded the Pac-Man series eight records in Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, including "Most Successful Coin-Operated Game".

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.

One event called Pac-Manhattan set a Guinness World Record for "Largest Pac-Man Game" in 2004.

The Buckner & Garcia song "Pac-Man Fever" (1981) went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and received a Gold certification for more than 1 million records sold by 1982, and a total of 2.5 million copies sold as of 2008.

In 1982, "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a parody of "Taxman" by the Beatles as "Pac-Man".

It was then ported in 1982 to Atari's home console the Atari 2600, and sold about 5,000,000 copies.

The music group Buckner & Garcia released a song called "Pac-Man Fever", which rose to number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Single sales passed 1,000,000 copies in the United States, and Columbia Records presented a gold disc to Namco.

There are also cases of its use in the activities of local governments; for example, the Sendai City Transportation Bureau used Pac-Man as the image character of "100 En Pakku", a flat fare campaign of 100 yen for city centre buses that it ran from 2002 to 2003.

In the Gamest Mook The Best Game, based on a popularity poll of Gamest readers held in 1991 covering every arcade game in operation up to that time, it took No. 48.

In the "Cross Review" feature of the magazine Famitsu, the game scored a total of 20.

In the "Game Report Card" reader poll run by the magazine Family Computer Magazine,it scored 18.37 out of 30, as shown below.

In the "Cross Review" feature of the magazine Famitsu, the game scored a total of 22.

On 2012-11-15 the American magazine Time announced the 100 greatest video games in history, and it was chosen among them.

This was announced as part of a series similar to "Time 100", which selects the 100 most influential people in the world.

According to the developer, sales of close to 3,000,000 units were recorded at the time.

According to the American research firm RescueTime, a calculation based on the time that Google users were assumed to have spent playing the game showed that 4,820,000 person-hours, or about 120 million dollars (about 10800 million yen), of productivity may have been lost worldwide.

By 1982, it was estimated to have had 30 million active players across the United States; Pac-Man was so compelling that a player in San Francisco reportedly shot someone for interrupting him during play.

In 2009, Guinness World Records listed Pac-Man as the most recognizable video game character in the United States, recognized by 94% of the population, above Mario who was recognized by 93% of the population.

The Buckner & Garcia song "Pac-Man Fever" (1981) went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and received a Gold certification for more than 1 million records sold by 1982, and a total of 2.5 million copies sold as of 2008.

Yee received a letter from United States president Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a world record score of 6,131,940 points, possible only if he had passed level 256.

Coleco's tabletop Mini-Arcade versions of the game yielded 1.5 million units sold in 1982.

On the other hand, in an interview timed to the release of the film Pixels, Iwatani said that in the United States Pac-Man is recognised as a hero of justice. As a past example he mentioned that, when he was approached about using Pac-Man on casino machines, a complaint came from one American state that "Pac-Man belongs to children", and the plan was dropped.

In time, Namco brought a civil suit against a company that had installed unauthorised copies of the Pac-Man board in coffee shops and operated them, on the grounds that it had infringed the right to screen a film.

On 1984-9-28 the Tokyo District Court handed down its judgment, and the images of Pac-Man were recognised as a cinematographic work under copyright law.

As material for this lawsuit, internal data such as the algorithm for the movement of the monsters and the speed of Pac-Man's movement were made public.

Namco also brought a civil suit against Gijutsu Hyoronsha for including in a magazine and publishing shareware that infringed the copyright of Pac-Man.

On 1994-1-31 the Tokyo District Court handed down its judgment, and part of the claim was upheld.

On 1982-5-24 it was sued by Namco for copyright infringement.

Atari sued Philips for creating K.C.

In 2025, the film was reportedly canceled as a result of the It Ends with Us controversy.

According to what Sarukawa said in an interview in 2020, at first there was room to spare given the number of units that had been arranged, but from around 40 to 50 days after shipping, operators noticed that, although the sales were not as spectacular as those of Galaxian, they were sustained, and orders for the game came in one after another.

At 0 o'clock on 2010-5-22, to mark 30 years since the birth of Pac-Man, the top page logo of the internet search site Google was changed to a Pac-Man design.

It was to be shown for a limited period of 48 hours, but the response was so great that after it was removed from the top page it could be played on a dedicated page (see External links).

Pac-Man, originally titled in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and published by Namco for arcades.

Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he rounded out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi ().

Namco president Masaya Nakamura had originally requested that all of the ghosts be colored red and appear indistinguishable from one another.

Some record keeping organizations removed Mitchell's score after a 2018 investigation by Twin Galaxies concluded that two unrelated Donkey Kong score performances submitted by Mitchell had not used an unmodified original circuit board.

When Namco presented Pac-Man and Rally-X to potential distributors at the 1980 AMOA tradeshow in November 1980, executives believed that Rally-X would become the best-selling game of the year.

The most infamous of these is the 1982 Atari 2600 conversion designed by Tod Frye and published by Atari, Inc. This version of the game was widely criticized for its inaccurate recreation of the arcade version and for its peculiar design choices, especially the flickering effect of the ghosts.

Play Meter magazine previewed the game and called it "a cute game which appears to grow on players, something which cute games are not prone to do," saying that there's "more to the game than at first appears" but criticized the sound as a drawback, saying it is "good for awhile, then becomes annoying.

It overtook Atari's Asteroids (1979) as the best-selling arcade game in the country, and surpassed the film Star Wars (1977) with more than billion in revenue.

The Atari 2600 version of the game sold over copies, making it the console's best-selling title.

Its neon visuals and fast-paced gameplay was met with acclaim, leading to the creation of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (2010) and Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (2016).

In an interview in 2019 Iwatani looked back on the game. He had expected it to be accepted by Japanese women and couples, and seeing that happen he thought it would be a hit in Japan, but he had thought that people outside Japan, who seek thrills and excitement, would not accept it, so the worldwide hit was unexpected. He analyses that the simple gameplay and the cute character appealed to people of all ages.

It was made under licence from Namco, and both in shape and in game content it follows the Coleco FL Pac-Man sold outside Japan.

Upon its North American debut at AMOA 1980, the game initially received a mild response.

The 2018 film Relaxer uses Pac-Man as a strong plot element in the story of a 1999 couch-bound man who attempts to beat the game (and encounters the famous Level 256 glitch) before the year 2000 problem occurs.

In 2025, the film was reportedly canceled as a result of the It Ends with Us controversy.