Five things you should know about Pac-Man
Toru Iwatani, creator of a game spanning more than 30 years, and appearing on almost every game console known to man, offered a postmortem last month on the industry’s biggest franchise-and told a few tales most of us have probably never heard.
The point was to attract girls!
Gaming in the late 70s was pretty much exclusively a guy thing. Iwatani wanted to flip this, creating a genre appealing to women and families, he says.
“The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers,” he says. “Back then, there were no home games. People had to go to the arcade center to play games. That was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.”
Each ghost had specific orders
When you play the game, it might seem as if the four ghosts are actively chasing you. That’s not exactly true. Iwatani intentionally avoided programming them with that purpose, since that would have resulted in Pac-Man zipping around the screen with four ghosts always right behind him.Instead, it’s only Blinky, the red ghost, who doggedly pursues you throughout the game. Pinky, the pink ghost (naturally), simply wants to position itself at a point that’s 32 pixels in front of Pac-Man’s mouth. The blue ghost, Inky, is seeking to position itself at a similar fixed spot. And Clyde, the orange ghost, moves completely at random.
Because the player constantly has Pac-Man on the go, however, the ghosts are always changing direction and trying to achieve their goal, which adds to the challenge of the game.
What does Pac-Man mean?
You may have heard the story about how a pizza with a missing slice inspired Pac-Man’s design. But it turns out the game was designed entirely around food.
“I thought about something that may attract girls,” says Iwatani. “Maybe boy stories or something to do with fashion. However, girls love to eat desserts. My wife often does! So the verb ‘eat’ gave me a hint to create this game.”
That theme continued with the game’s name. In Japanese, “puck puck” is akin to the U.S. saying “munch munch”. So the original name - Puck-Man - translated as “Munch man”. (A savvy Midway Games official changed it to Pac-Man when the game hit the U.S. to discourage vandals from shaving off part of the “P,” thereby creating an obscene word..).. (iuc-Man)
Pac-Man was designed to be as simple as possible, to attract a wide audience. The limits of technology in 1980 made this a little easier to achieve. Iwatani says he’s happy about this now, but at the time, there was one more thing he wanted to add to the game.
“I wanted to have a shelter and it would move up and down,” he says. “When the ghost comes, the ghost would be pinched by the shelter which would disfigure the ghost.”
The ghosts were almost just one colorIt’s kind of hard to picture Pac-Man without the brightly colored ghosts today, but when the game was being developed, Iwatani says he was pressured hard to change that.
The president of Namco ordered him to make the ghosts a single color - red, to be precise - since she believed players would be confused that some ghosts, perhaps, were Pac-Man’s ally.
Iwatani refused the order and on questionnaires to the game’s testers, asked if they would prefer a single color ghost or four. Not a single person wanted the single-color option. That ultimately convinced the president she was wrong.
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