Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
The long answer, however, is that Pac-Man's creative design dovetailed perfectly with its gameplay. With its single joystick, Pac-Man boasted the simplest player-control mechanism since Pong. It didn't require the frantic button-pressing of, say, Asteroids or Missile Command, the reigning arcade champions at the time of Pac-Man's release. Combined with the unabashedly cute visuals and the explosion-free sound design, Pac-Man began to attract more kids and younger kids than any other video game to date. Most prominently, Pac-Man gained notice for its appeal to girls, at that time (and arguably still) an almost completely untapped segment of the market.
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.
Of course, Pac-Man's potency as a game was eclipsed only by its perfection as a symbol. Having entered the mall, he proceeded to take over the joint. The little yellow guy who could consume an endless quantity of pixilated dots turned out to be the object of near-endless public consumption.
The psychic space that Pac-Man grew to occupy in early 1980s popular culture was truly enormous, filling in the vacuum of downtime between "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" and stepping into the breach vacated by Kiss, when all of America realized that the "Unmasked" album sucked, and sucked hard. Kiss and "Star Wars" are important for an understanding of Pac-Man, in that they created the model for the multimedia marketing blitz that Pac-Man subsequently adopted. But there's a crucial difference here.
The pseudo-mythic underpinnings of both "Star Wars" and Kiss gave their marketing campaigns a relative embarrassment of semiotic riches around which to build licensing opportunities. I mean, of course there was a Kiss comic book. Of course Toys 'R Us carried a full line of toy light sabers. But I can guarantee that no marketing executive looked at Pac-Man in 1980 and said, "You know what? I think there's a phone here."
Rather, it was Pac-Man's very spareness and abstraction that allowed for so many permutations to make their way into the culture. Pac-Man became a kind of Everyblob. Licensed images of him were slightly humanized, lending him arms and legs to allow for a variety of active poses, as well as a set of black eyes with the suggestion of pupils. But by and large he remains an abstract figure, limited to a few stock activities: eating, chasing, being chased. The most commonly reproduced image shows Pac-Man at a moment of triumph, devouring his ghostly nemeses. In nearly every image, he is smiling broadly, his eyes given a mischievous tilt; he looks like a good-time guy, a cross between R. Crumb's Mr. Natural and a Wilson tennis ball.
Why did America grip Pac-Man so fiercely in its mercantile embrace? The novelty record album "Pac-Man Fever" went to No. 9, for Christ's sake. Though the bulk of the licensing effort targeted children, it wasn't just the kids that were buying: Witness the Pac-Man coffee mug, the Pac-Man ashtray, the Pac-Man Zippo lighter. While it's become fashionable to read the success of this merchandising orgy as a direct outgrowth of the game's content -- Pac-Man gobbling dots equals kids buying Pac-Man lunchboxes -- such an explanation smacks of over-reliance on hindsight. Markets aren't that self-conscious. Pac-Man didn't occupy its place in commercial culture because consumers wanted to metaphorically imitate an insatiably hungry little yellow ball; they bought because the game was good enough to tap into genuine sources of pleasure.
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