Developed in Tokyo forty years ago and popular almost immediately, Pac-Man left a mark on gaming that went well beyond what anyone might have expected from a yellow circle eating dots.
Every industry has its turning points. Facebook showed that people would socialise online under their real names at a time when anonymous chat was at its peak. Apple’s iPhone changed what a phone could be. Spotify changed how we listen to music, Netflix how we watch films. In gaming, Pac-Man occupies that same kind of position — a game that looks almost trivially simple from the outside, yet managed to shift things in ways that still hold up today, both as entertainment and as a cultural moment.
So How Did It Manage That?
Before Pac-Man, the gaming landscape had a fairly consistent character. Most games were combat-focused, and most were designed with a male audience squarely in mind. Pac-Man broke with both of those assumptions.
In 1980, a Japanese game designer named Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man, which was released under Namco.
At a time when success in gaming largely meant designing something players could shoot things in, Iwatani came at it from a completely different angle.
Rather than shooting or destroying, Pac-Man was built around “eating“. The game originally launched as “Puck-Man,” derived from the Japanese phrase paku paku taberu, meaning roughly to chomp or gobble something up.
The iconic yellow design came from the same idea. According to Iwatani, the character’s shape was inspired by a pizza with one slice removed — he looked down at what was left and saw a mouth.
When the game arrived in the United States, the name changed. “Puck-Man” carried an obvious risk: it wouldn’t take much for the “P” to become an “F” on an arcade cabinet, and nobody wanted that. So “Pac-Man” it became. Whether the rename had anything to do with what followed is hard to say, but the game’s rise after that point was significant.
Pac-Man also brought genuine technical innovations. The power pellets that let the player turn the tables on the ghosts became the foundation for what we now think of as “power-ups” — a mechanic that’s everywhere in modern gaming. The short animated cutscenes between stages were also unusual for the time, something players simply hadn’t seen before.
The Power of Genderlessness
Pac-Man’s most significant impact on gaming, however, came down to gender. As I mentioned earlier, pre-Pac-Man games were combat-focused and generally aimed at men. The main characters in those games were almost always male. Pac-Man broke that pattern entirely.
The main character had no gender. And instead of shooting, hitting, breaking or fighting — activities typically associated with men — the whole game revolved around eating, something both genders do. That shift changed how people thought about games. In short, Pac-Man showed that women could play games too. And proved it.
Given its place as a milestone in gaming history, Pac-Man was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012.
Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2020, Pac-Man has secured its place in history as a game that changed the rules — both technically and sociologically.
Sources: Namco, CNN, Grunge, The Guardian