The gaming world has developed an entire pantheon of heroes and icons over the years. Nintendo arguably has the most recognisable with Mario, Yoshi, Pikachu and Link, among many others, while Sega has Sonic. Then there are the more adult mascots like Lara, Master Chief and Snake that are instantly recognisable to all the initiated gamers out there. But you have to remember that once upon a time there were no such gaming gods. There had to be a first. There had to be Pac-man...
Almost everyone has played Pac-man at some point in their lives. My first experience of him was when I was three or four years old, on an old and beaten up Atari 2600 that I had stolen off my brother. Even for those few, solitary people who haven't, the image of the yellow, chomping dot is synonymous with gaming culture.
Pac-man was born in 1980 when Namco designer Toru Iwatani was searching for a new game idea that would appeal to a new base of consumers. Iwatani recognised that the games of the day were mainly aimed at men, as most titles had the player shooting at aliens of some description. Instead of this, he wanted the gaming arcade to be a place where girls could go too, and potentially turn arcades into a place where couples could go on dates together. Iwatani in turn decided on a central theme of eating and things quickly slotted into place after that. The end result was a pop culture sensation.
Before Pac-man's release, industry veterans were expecting the game to fail only to soon discover how wrong they were. Instead the game flourished. Atari more or less stopped trying to compete with early console rivals after they released the first Pac-man cartridge, while in the arcade it is today estimated that the game has generated around $2.6 Billion just out of the change players slotted into the machines. Pac-man also resulted in the first major merchandising campaign for a game as everything from t-shirts to lunch boxes soon had the cutsey characters printed on them. I seem to recall in my youth even a tilting table top version of the game, relying on a series of magnets to duplicate the game play.
It is perhaps remarkable in many ways that the character can still find a way to reinvent himself time after time. The vast majority of modern Pac-man games get little to no press attention at all and yet they keep getting made. The latest, Pac-man and the Ghostly Adventures 2, is due out in a little over a month, and while you can bet you probably will not hear about it, it will do well enough that the tenacious, hungry sphere will find his way back to us again. Although, no matter what, generations to come will still have the experience of playing the original at some point or another. After all, Pac-man isn't just a game; it's a right of passage into the gaming community.
What's your high score?
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