Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
With its canary-yellow Everyblob hero, its masterfully simple design and its abstract realm where even death was a cheerful event, Pac-Man brought video gaming out of the bars and into the malls.
Jun 17, 2002 | Future generations will not believe it, but there was a moment when Pac-Man was as big as "Star Wars." A quick glimpse on eBay reveals, in no particular order: a set of Fleer wax-pack trading cards; the classic Pac-Man metal lunchbox; the Milton Bradley Pac-Man board game; a 12-inch remix of the "Pac-Man Fever" single, featuring an instrumental version and, scarily enough, a club version; Pac-Mania, the Official Pac-Man Joke Book ("96 Pac-filled pages of biting humor!"); and yes, a Pac-Man telephone. And that's all on Web Page 1 ... of seven.
Video games have become a part of contemporary life. The kids who grew up steering Pac-Man around his dot-filled maze have grown up to make video games one of the biggest slices of the entertainment-industry pie. Yet no game to date has come close to dominating the popular landscape the way Pac-Man did in the early 1980s. Certainly, the novelty of both the game and the medium itself was a major factor in creating the Pac-phenomenon. But all the later and equally novel video game landmarks -- Donkey Kong and Mario, Street Fighter, Myst, Doom, the Sims -- are eclipsed by Pac-Man's gigantic, canary-yellow sun.
Pac-Man was the brainchild of Toru Iwatani, a designer for Namco, the Japanese company best known at the dawn of the 1980s for releasing the first-ever color video arcade game, Galaxian. Apart from its chromatics, Galaxian was typical of video games of the era, which is to say it was a more or less blatant rip-off of Taito's Space Invaders. Released in 1978, Space Invaders cast its player as a last line of defense against marauding aliens: The bad guys marched down the screen to get you; you fired back up at them. Space Invaders proved so addictive that it not only inaugurated an entire video game paradigm, it caused a nationwide coin shortage in Japan.
Iwatani imagined something different, a video game that looked and felt like a cartoon. Inspiration struck, as it so often does, while he was eating a pizza. Noting that a pizza pie with one slice removed resembled an open-mouthed head, Iwatani had a vision: an animated pizza, racing through a maze and eating things with its absent-slice mouth. By any account, this is a bizarre vision, and it still packs a certain deranged wallop, even in the current animated-food era of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. (Animated food did indeed hit the video game world soon after, in Data East's deeply weird 1982 release, Burger Time.) But we can be thankful for the technical limitations that forced Iwatani to abandon his pizza epiphany and recast his protagonist in the lemony hue we've come to know.
The game and character were christened "Puckman," from the Japanese pakupaku, meaning to flap one's mouth open and closed. (Is there anything the Japanese don't have a word for?) In one of the great preemptive acts of damage control in marketing history, an executive at American licensor Bally/Midway changed the name of the import to Pac-Man, after noting the near-limitless vandalistic potential of the original moniker. This individual's name is lost to the ages, but we can offer silent thanks to him for ensuring a healthy and unblemished Pac-legacy.
In late 1980 and 1981, the game became a massive hit on both sides of the Pacific, moving an unheard-of 100,000 units in America while inciting another shortage of coin-based yen in Japan. Even now, it's easy to see why. The short answer is that Iwatani succeeded: Pac-Man feels like a cartoon, from the bouncy theme music to the animated eyes on the ghosts to the forlorn sound effect as Pac-Man is apprehended and shrinks away to nothingness. Far more so than any other game before it (and many that came after), Pac-Man possessed elements of drama, giving names to its avatars and featuring them in brief comic interludes that played out after the player had achieved a certain level of success.
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