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Saturday 3 December 2016

Pac-Man

Pac-Man is an arcade game developed by Namco and created by Japanese video game designer Toru Iwatani.

The first ever Pac-Man machine - then called Puck-Man - was installed in a Tokyo movie theater on May 22, 1980.

Pac-Man's name was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeia "pakku-pakku," which sounds like someone opening and closing their mouth.

In Pac-Man, the player makes a Pac-Man, a yellow disc, move around a maze. The goal is to eat every yellow pellet (circles) while not getting caught by the ghosts/monsters. For extra points, fruits that appear can also be eaten. When Pac-Man eats a white pellet, the ghosts turn blue and can be eaten.

Even though the game has 256 stages, the last level cannot be finished due an integer overflow in the game's code. Since it is an 8-bit game, the maximum integer value is 28 - 1, or 255.

Level 256, unplayable under normal circumstances  Wikipedia 

In the Japanese version of Pac-Man, the ghosts' names were hints as to how they behaved—Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle, and Stupid.

Pac-Man was licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway and released in October 1980.

Within 15 months of Pac-Man's U.S. release, Americans had spent over $1,000,000,000 in quarters playing the game.

In 1982, Pac-Man earned $6 billion in quarters, which was more than the combined amount of money spent in Las Vegas casinos and US movie theaters that year.

The maximum possible score is 3,333,360 points. The video game champion Billy Mitchell was the first player to achieve a perfect Pac-Man score on July 3, 1999 at Funspot Family Fun Center in New Hampshire.


There are 240 white dots in a Pac-Man arcade game.

Pac-Man is credited for laying the foundations for the stealth game genre, as it emphasized avoiding enemies rather than fighting them.


Pac-Man inspired a legacy in other media, such as the Hanna-Barbera animated TV show, which aired on ABC in the early 1980s. It was the first cartoon based on a video game.

Pac-Man also inspired the top-ten hit single "Pac-Man Fever".

Pac-Man was an icon of 1980s culture. It has the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers, recognized by 94 percent of them, according to the Davie-Brown Index.

The classic Pac-Man

It is one of the highest-grossing video games of all time. Toward the end of the 20th century, the arcade game's total gross consumer revenue was estimated by Twin Galaxies at more than 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion).

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