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GAME · 1980 · JAPAN

Pac-Man

Original title
Pakkuman

10 archived facts 3 topics

Pac-Man is an arcade game released in 1980. Its maximum possible score is 3,333,360 points.

10 Interesting Facts About Pac-Man

Interesting Facts (7)

  1. #001

    A perfect Pac-Man score is 3,333,360 points. The first person known to have reached it was Billy Mitchell, an American, on 3 July 1999. The run lasted six hours and carried him through 256 levels. On the last level, a programming limit leaves only half the maze, and the right side of the screen fills with garbage characters. When the maximum score is reached, the game locks up and has to be restarted.

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  2. #002

    Toru Iwatani said he created Pac-Man to draw girls to the game, since arcades before its release were mostly patronized by boys. He set out to change that with a game girls or the whole family could play.

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  3. #003

    Seeing the game's success in Japan, Namco began planning to bring it to international markets, especially the United States. Before showing it to distributors, Namco of America made several changes, including renaming the ghosts. The title was another: Namco executives feared vandals would turn the "P" in Puck Man into an "F". Masaya Nakamura chose Pac-Man, feeling it was closer to the game's original Japanese title, Pakkuman. In Europe the game was released under both names. After Puck Man was ruled out but before Pac-Man was settled on, early American promotional material used the name Snapper.

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  4. #004

    Namco's president initially wanted all four ghosts to be red. After game testers advised against single-color ghosts, Toru Iwatani convinced him to make them multicolored.

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  5. #005

    Each ghost followed a set movement pattern. Blinky is the only ghost in the maze that chases Pac-Man; the others target points ahead of him.

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  6. #006

    The Atari 2600 version was one of the few games that set off the video game crash of 1983.

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  7. #007

    The game's title comes from the Japanese word "paku-paku", the onomatopoeic sound of a mouth opening and closing.

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Production Story (2)

  1. #008

    Toru Iwatani has often said that Pac-Man's shape came from a pizza missing one slice, seen during his lunch; in a 1986 interview he called this only half-true, adding that the character was also based on rounding out and simplifying the Japanese character "kuchi", meaning "mouth".

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  2. #009

    The large pills in the maze corners are often called "power pellets", but in the original game their official name is "energizers". "Power pellet" was coined for the later television cartoon based on the game.

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Characters & Cast (1)

  1. #010

    Namco approached Atari about American distribution, but Atari turned it down, judging the game too easy.

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