Pac-Man: The History

Most people know that Pac-Man was and is big, but how big exactly? Well, it made more money than Star Wars in the year after it came out, making over one billion in quarters. It became the highest grossing video game of all time toward the end of the 20th century, dethroning Space Invaders. And the series has been awarded eight records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008.

How did it become the "greatest video game of all time"? It all started with its creator, the then 24 year old Toru Iwatani. In April 1979, with a nine-man team, he began work on the classic, and in a year he was finished. The game was originally titled PUCKMAN, referring  to the main character's hockey puck shape. However in 1980 when Midway picked up the game for manufacture in the US, the name was changed to Pac-Man.

Iwatani designed the game with the goal in mind to try to attract a wider audience. Because at the time most arcade games were geared towards male users, he wanted to attract more females to the arcades as well. He tried to achieve this by making the characters cuter, and more colorful.

Pac-Man was the first video game to ever use power-ups. The concept of eating to gain power was one borrowed from Popeye, according to Iwatani. He also maintained over the years that Pac-Man's shape was inspired by a pizza with a slice missing, but in 1986 he admitted that it was only partially true, and Pac-Man's unique shape was also born from simplifying and rounding out the Kanji character for mouth, kuchi (口).

When it was first released by Namco in Japan in 1980, Pac-Man didn't get the response that was hoped for due to the popularity of games like Space Invaders. The responses when it was released in the US were a lot more positive, and took competitors and distributors by surprise. And by 1982 was estimated to have 30 million users across the United States. It then beat out the previous best selling arcade game in North America, Asteroids.

Pac-Man continues to be popular, and will celebrate its 40th birthday on May 22 in 2020.