| Pac-Man | |
|---|---|
North American Flyer |
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| Developer(s) | Namco |
| Publisher(s) | Namco, Midway |
| Designer(s) | Tōru Iwatani – Game designer Shigeo Funaki (舟木茂雄) – Programmer Toshio Kai (甲斐敏夫) – Sound & Music |
| Composer(s) | Toshio Kai |
| Platform(s) | Arcade |
| Release date(s) | |
| Genre(s) | Maze |
| Mode(s) | Up to two players, alternating turns |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: E OFLC: G |
| Cabinet | Standard upright, mini-upright and cocktail |
| Arcade system | Namco Pac-Man |
| CPU | 1x ZiLOG Z80 @ 3.072 MHz[4][5] |
| Sound | 1× Namco WSG (3-channel mono) @ 3.072 MHz |
| Display | Vertically oriented, 224 × 288, 16 palette colors |
Pac-Man (パックマン Pakkuman) is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980.[1][2] Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture.[6][7][8][9] Upon its release, the game—and, subsequently, Pac-Man derivatives—became a social phenomenon[10] that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among other things, an animated television series and a top-ten hit single.[11]
When Pac-Man was released, the most popular arcade video games were space shooters, in particular Space Invaders and Asteroids. The most visible minority were sports games that were mostly derivative of Pong. Pac-Man succeeded by creating a new genre and appealing to both genders.[12] Pac-Man is often credited with being a landmark in video game history, and is among the most famous arcade games of all time.[13] It is also the highest-grossing video game of all time,[14] having generated more than $2.5 billion in quarters by the 1990s.[15][16]
The character has appeared in more than 30 officially licensed game spin-offs,[17] as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs.[18] According to the Davie-Brown Index, Pac-Man has the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers, recognized by 94 percent of them.[19] Pac-Man is one of the longest running video game franchises from the golden age of video arcade games, and one of only three video games that are on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. (along with Pong and Dragon's Lair).[20]
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The player controls Pac-Man through a maze, eating pac-dots. When all dots are eaten, Pac-Man is taken to the next stage, between some stages one of three intermission animations plays.[21] Four enemies (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde) roam the maze, trying to catch Pac-Man. If an enemy touches Pac-Man, a life is lost. When all lives have been lost, the game ends. Pac-Man is awarded a single bonus life at 10,000 points by default—DIP switches inside the machine can change the required points or disable the bonus life altogether. Near the corners of the maze are four larger, flashing dots known as power pellets that provide Pac-Man with the temporary ability to eat the enemies. The enemies turn deep blue, reverse direction and usually move more slowly. When an enemy is eaten, its eyes remain and return to the center box where it is regenerated in its normal color. Blue enemies flash white before they become dangerous again and the length of time for which the enemies remain vulnerable varies from one stage to the next, generally becoming shorter as the game progresses. In later stages, the enemies go straight to flashing, bypassing blue, although they still reverse direction when a power pellet is eaten.
The enemies in Pac-Man are known variously as "ghosts" and "monsters".[22][23][24] Despite the seemingly random nature of the enemies, their movements are strictly deterministic, which players have used to their advantage.[25] In an interview, creator Toru Iwatani stated that he had designed each enemy with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming impossibly difficult or boring to play.[26] More recently, Iwatani described the enemy behaviors in more detail at the 2011 Game Developers Conference. He stated that the red enemy chases Pac-Man, and the pink and blue enemies try to position themselves in front of Pac-Man's mouth.[27] While he claimed that the orange enemy's behavior is random, a careful analysis of the game's code reveals that it actually chases Pac-Man most of the time, but also moves toward the lower-left corner of the maze when Pac-Man is facing a certain direction.[28]
| Enemy Color | Original Puck Man[29] | American Pac-Man | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Character (Personality) | Translation | Nickname | Translation | Alternate character |
Alternate nickname |
Character (Personality) | Nickname | |
| Red | Oikake (追いかけ) | chaser | Akabei (赤ベイ) | red guy | Urchin | Macky | Shadow | Blinky |
| Pink | Machibuse (待ち伏せ) | ambusher | Pinky (ピンキー) | pink guy | Romp | Micky | Speedy | Pinky |
| Cyan | Kimagure (気まぐれ) | fickle | Aosuke (青助) | blue guy | Stylist | Mucky | Bashful | Inky |
| Orange | Otoboke (お惚け) | stupid | Guzuta (愚図た) | slow guy | Crybaby | Mocky | Pokey | Clyde |
Pac-Man was designed to have no ending – as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to play the game indefinitely. However, a bug keeps this from happening: Normally, no more than seven fruit are displayed at the bottom of the screen at any one time. But when the internal level counter, which is stored in a single byte, reaches 255, the subroutine that draws the fruit erroneously "rolls over" this number to zero, causing it to try to draw 256 fruit instead of the usual seven. This corrupts the bottom of the screen and the entire right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making it impossible to eat enough dots to beat the level. Because this effectively ends the game, this "split-screen" level is often referred to as the "kill screen". Emulators and code analysis have revealed what would happen should this 255th level be cleared: The fruit and intermissions would restart at level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages.[30]
A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player achieves the maximum possible score on the first 255 levels (by eating every possible dot, power pellet, fruit, and enemy) without losing a single life, and then scoring as many points as possible in the last level.[31][32] As verified by the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard on July 3, 1999, the first person to achieve this maximum possible score (3,333,360 points) was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, who performed the feat in about six hours.[32][33]
In September 2009, David Race of Beavercreek, Ohio, became the sixth person to achieve a perfect score. His time of 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 22 seconds set a new record for the fastest time to obtain a perfect score.[34]
In December 1982, an 8-year-old boy, Jeffrey R. Yee, supposedly received a letter from U.S. President Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a worldwide record of 6,131,940 points, a score only possible if he had passed the Split-Screen Level.[32] Whether or not this event happened as described has remained in heated debate among video-game circles since its supposed occurrence. In September 1983, Walter Day, chief scorekeeper at Twin Galaxies, took the US National Video Game Team on a tour of the East Coast to visit video game players who claimed they could get through the Split-Screen Level. No video game player could demonstrate this ability. In 1999, Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 to anyone who could pass through the Split-Screen Level before January 1, 2000. The prize went unclaimed.[32]
The game was developed primarily by a young Namco employee named Tōru Iwatani over the course of a year, beginning in April 1979, employing a nine-man team. It was based on the concept of eating, and the original Japanese title was Pakkuman (パックマン), inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic slang phrase paku-paku taberu (パクパク食べる),[35][36] where paku-paku describes (the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.[37]
Although Iwatani has repeatedly stated that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice,[10] he admitted in a 1986 interview that this was a half-truth and the character design also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (口).[38] Iwatani attempted to appeal to a wider audience—beyond the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers. This led him to add elements of a maze, as well as cute ghost enemy characters. The result was a game he named Puck Man.[39]
Later in 1980, the game was picked up for manufacture in the United States by Bally division Midway,[38] which changed the game's name from Puck Man to Pac-Man in an effort to avoid vandalism to the letter 'P'. The cabinet artwork was also changed.[40]
When first launched in Japan by Namco in 1980, the game received a lukewarm response, as Space Invaders and other similar games were more popular at the time.[12] However, the game found far more success in North America. Pac-Man's success in North America took competitors and distributors completely by surprise in 1980. Marketing executives who saw Pac-Man at a trade show prior to release completely overlooked the game (along with the now classic Defender), while they looked to a racing car game called Rally-X as the game to outdo that year.[41] The appeal of Pac-Man was such that the game caught on immediately with the public; it quickly became far more popular than anything seen in the game industry up to that point. Pac-Man outstripped Asteroids as the best-selling arcade game in North America,[42][43] where it would sell more than 350,000 arcade cabinets[44][45] (retailing at around $2400 each)[46] for $1 billion[44] (equivalent to over $2.3 billion in 2011)[47] within 18 months,[44] and gross over $1 billion in quarters within a year.[15][48] Towards the end of the 20th century, the game's total gross in quarters had been estimated at more than 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion),[15][16] equivalent to over $3.4 billion in 2011,[47] making it the highest-grossing video game of all time.[14]
The game is regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time, for a number of reasons: its titular character was the first original gaming mascot, the game established the maze chase game genre, it demonstrated the potential of characters in video games, it opened gaming to female audiences, and it was gaming's first licensing success.[49] In addition, it was the first video game to feature power-ups,[50] and it is frequently credited as the first game to feature cut scenes, in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and the ghosts chasing each other around during those interludes,[51] though Space Invaders Part II employed a similar technique that same year. Pac-Man is also credited for laying the foundations for the stealth game genre, as it emphasized avoiding enemies rather than fighting them,[52] and had an influence on the early stealth game Metal Gear (where guards chase Solid Snake in a similar manner to Pac-Man when he is spotted).[53] Pac-Man has also influenced many other games, ranging from the sandbox game Grand Theft Auto (where the player runs over pedestrians and gets chased by police in a similar manner)[54] to early first-person shooters such as MIDI Maze (which had similar maze-based gameplay and character designs),[55][56] Wolfenstein 3D (which was similar in level design[57] and featured a Pac-Man level from a first-person perspective)[58][59] and Doom (with its similar emphasis on mazes, power-ups, killing monsters, and reaching the next level).[60]
Pac-Man is one of the few games to have been consistently published for over three decades, having been remade on numerous platforms and spawned many sequels. Re-releases include ported and updated versions of the original arcade game.
One of the first ports to be released was the much maligned port for the Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man only somewhat resembled the original, and its flickering ghosts were widely criticized.[61][62][63] Despite the criticism, it sold seven million units,[64] costing $37.95 each,[11] becoming the best selling game on the Atari 2600 console, though it would eventually become one of the contributing factors to Atari's decline and the North American video game crash of 1983, alongside Atari's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.[64]
It was also released for the Apple II series, Atari's 5200 and 8-bit computers, IBM Personal Computer, Intellivision, the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 and Nintendo Entertainment System. For handheld game consoles, it was released on the Game Boy, Sega Game Gear, Game Boy Color, and the Neo Geo Pocket Color.
The game has also been featured in Namco's long-running Namco Museum video game compilations. Downloads of the game have been made available on game services such as Xbox Live Arcade, GameTap and Virtual Console. Namco has also released mobile versions for BREW, Java, iOS, as well as Palm PDAs and Windows Mobile-based devices. A port of Pac-Man for Android[65] can be controlled not only through an Android phone's trackball but through touch gestures or its on-board accelerometer.
In addition, Namco has repeatedly re-released the game to arcades. In 2001, Namco released a Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga "Class of 1981 Reunion Edition" cabinet with Pac-Man available for play as a hidden game. To commemorate Pac-Man's 25th anniversary in 2005, Namco released a revision that officially featured all three games.
Namco Networks ported Pac-Man to the PC (bought online) in 2009 which also includes an "Enhanced" mode which replaces all of the original sprites with the sprites from Pac-Man Championship Edition but it's still the original Pac-Man otherwise, Namco Networks also made a bundle (also bought online) which includes their PC version of Pac-Man as well as their port of Dig Dug called Namco All-Stars: Pac-Man and Dig Dug.
In 2010 Namco Bandai has announced that they are releasing this game on Windows Phone 7 as an Xbox Live game.[66]
Pac-Man's spawned sequels and spin-offs includes only one which was designed by Tōru Iwatani . Some of the follow-ups were not developed by Namco either – including the most significant, Ms. Pac-Man, released in the United States in 1981. Originally called Crazy Otto, this unauthorized hack of Pac-Man was created by General Computer Corporation and sold to Midway without Namco's permission. The game features several changes from the original Pac-Man, including faster gameplay, more mazes, new intermissions, and moving bonus items. Some consider Ms. Pac-Man to be superior to the original, and even the best in the entire series.[13] Namco sued Midway for exceeding their license. Eventually, Bally Midway struck a deal with Namco to officially license Ms. Pac-Man as a sequel.
Following Ms. Pac-Man, Bally Midway released several other unauthorized spin-offs, such as Pac-Man Plus, Jr. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man and Professor Pac-Man, resulting in Namco severing business relations with Midway.[10][67]
Various platform games based on the series have also been released by Namco, such as 1984's Pac-Land and the Pac-Man World series, which features Pac-Man in a 3-D world. More modern versions of the original game have also been developed, such as the multiplayer Pac-Man Vs. for the Nintendo GameCube and Tōru Iwatani-developed Pac-Man Championship Edition and its sequel.
For the weekend of May 21–23, 2010, Google changed the Google logo on its homepage to a Google Doodle of a fully playable version of the game[68] in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the game's release. The game featured the ability to play both Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man simultaneously.[69] After finishing the game, the website automatically redirected the user to a search of Pac-Man 30th Anniversary.[70] Companies across the world experienced slight drops in productivity due to the game, though the reported $120 million total loss "spread out across the entire world isn't a huge loss, comparatively speaking". Some organizations even temporarily blocked Google's website from workplace computers on the Friday it was uploaded, particularly where it violated regulations against recreational games.[71][72][73] Because of the popularity of the Pac-Man doodle, Google decided to allow access to the game through a separate web page.[74]
In 2011, Namco sent a DMCA notice to the team that made the programming language Scratch saying that a programmer had infringed copyright by making a Pacman game using the language and uploading it to Scratch's official website.[75]
In April 2011, Soap Creative published World's Biggest Pac-Man working together with Microsoft and Namco-Bandai to celebrate Pac-Man's 30th anniversary. It is a multiplayer browser-based game with user-created, interlocking mazes.
Pac-Man went on to become an icon of video game culture during the 1980s, and a wide variety of Pac-Man merchandise was marketed with the character's image, from t-shirts and toys to hand-held video game imitations and even specially shaped pasta. An animated TV series produced by Hanna–Barbera aired on ABC from 1982 to 1983.[76] The Killer List of Videogames lists Pac-Man as the #1 video game on its "Top 10 Most Popular Video games" list.[77] At one time, a feature film based on the game was also in development.[78][79] In 2010, a computer-generated animated series was reported to be in the works.[80][81]
Guinness World Records has awarded the Pac-Man series eight records in Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, including First Perfect Pac-Man Game for Billy Mitchell's July 3, 1999 score and "Most Successful Coin-Operated Game". On June 3, 2010, at the NLGD Festival of Games, the game's creator Toru Iwatani officially received the certificate from Guinness World Records for Pac-Man having had the most "coin-operated arcade machines" installed world wide: 293,822. The record was set and recognized in 2005 and mentioned in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, but finally actually awarded in 2010.[24]
Pac-Man has been referenced in numerous other media. In music, the Buckner & Garcia song "Pac-Man Fever" went to #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts,[11] and received a Gold certification with over a million records sold.[82] Their Pac-Man Fever album also received a Gold certification for selling over a million records.[83] "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a song titled "Pac-Man" that was a parody of The Beatles' "Taxman", in 1981.[84] Hip hop emcee Lil' Flip sampled sounds from the game Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to make his top-20 single "Game Over". Namco America filed a lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment for unauthorized use of these samples. The suit was eventually settled out of court.[85][86]
The game has also inspired various real-life recreations, involving either real people or robots. One event called Pac-Manhattan set a Guinness World Record for "Largest Pac-Man Game" in 2004.[87][88][89]
The term Pac-Man defense in mergers and acquisitions refers to a hostile takeover target that attempts to reverse the situation and take over its would-be acquirer instead, a reference to Pac-Man's power pellets.[90]
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