Pac-Man Background

Description

Pac-Man , stylized as PAC-MAN, is an arcade game developed by Namco and first released in Japan as Puck Man in May 1980. It was created by Japanese video game designer Toru Iwatani. It was licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway Games and released in October 1980. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, and an icon of 1980s popular culture. Upon its release, the game—and, subsequently, Pac-Man derivatives—became a social phenomenon that yielded high sales of merchandise and inspired a legacy in other media, such as the Pac-Man animated television series and the top-ten Buckner and Garcia hit single "Pac-Man Fever". The game was popular in the 1980s and 1990s and is still played in the 2010s.


Legacy
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 worldwide: 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.

The game has 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. The business 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. The game's popularity has led to "Pac-Man" being adopted as a nickname, most notably by boxer Manny Pacquiao, as well as the American football player Adam Jones.
On August 21, 2016, in the 2016 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, during a video which showcased Tokyo as the host of the 2020 Summer Olympics, a small segment shows Pac-Man and the ghosts racing against each other eating pac-dots on a running track.


Merchandise
The Pac-Man character and game series became an icon of video game culture during the 1980s, and a wide variety of Pac-Man merchandise has been marketed with the character's image, from t-shirts and toys to hand-held video game imitations and even specially shaped pasta.
General Mills manufactured a cereal by the Pac-Man name in 1983. Over the cereal's lifespan, characters from sequels Super Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were also added.


Television
The Pac-Man animated TV series produced by Hanna–Barbera aired on ABC from 1982 to 1983. In 2010, a computer-generated animated series titled Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures was reported to be in the works. The show was released on Disney XD in June 2013.


Music
In music, the Buckner & Garcia song "Pac-Man Fever" went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and received a Gold certification with over a million records sold by 1982, and a total of 2.5 million copies sold as of 2008. Their Pac-Man Fever album also received a Gold certification for selling over a million records. In 1982 "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a song titled "Pac-Man", which is a parody of "Taxman" by the Beatles. The song was played on the radio but was not released on a record at the time due to a cease and desist letter sent by the attorneys representing the Beatles. The song was eventually released in 2017 as part of the 15-album box set Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of "Weird Al" Yankovic. In 1992, Power-Pill released Pac-Man, a techno album which apart from a breakbeat and a few vocals, consists entirely of samples from Pac-Man. A remixed version of Pac-Man is set to appear in Ubisoft's upcoming rhythm game, Just Dance 2019


Film
At one time, a feature film based on the game was in development.In Weird Al Yankovic's music video for "White & Nerdy", there are several scenes of Weird Al dancing in a black room, in front of road flares shaped like the arcade version of Pac-Man .In the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, there are two scenes where the title character recites trivia about the name Pac-Man to a love interest. He mentions the original name was Puck-Man, from the Japanese word paku-paku , but was changed to avoid potential vandalism from its resemblance of a curse word.The Pac-Man character appears in the film Pixels , with Denis Akiyama playing series creator Toru Iwatani. Iwatani himself makes a cameo at the beginning of the film as an arcade technician.
In the Japanese tokusatsu film Kamen Rider Heisei Generations: Dr. Pac-Man vs. Ex-Aid & Ghost with Legend Riders, a Pac-Man-like character was introduced as the main villain. Pac-Man is referenced and makes an appearance in the 2017 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy 2. The protagonist Star-Lord is portrayed as a fan of the game, mentioning that he wants to create a Pac-Man statue in one scene, and later briefly takes the form of Pac-Man during the film's climactic battle.


Other gaming media
In 1982, Milton Bradley released a board game based on Pac-Man. In this game, players move up to four Pac-Man characters plus two ghosts as per the throws of a pair of dice. Each Pac-Man is assigned to a player while the ghosts are neutral and controlled by all players. Each player moves their Pac-Man the number of spaces on either die and a ghost the number of spaces on the other die, the Pac-Man consuming any white marbles and yellow marbles in its path. Players can move a ghost onto a Pac-Man and claim two white marbles from its player. They can also move a Pac-Man with a yellow marble inside it onto a ghost and claim two white marbles from any other player and bananas .Nelsonic Industries produced a Pac-Man LCD wristwatch game. This follows essentially the same rules as the video version, though with a simplified maze.A pinball version titled Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man was designed by George Christian and released by Bally/Midway in 1982. The spin-off arcade game Baby Pac-Man also contains a non-video pinball element.In South Pasadena, California a store called Kaldi has a non-commercially available Pac-Man 2 game machine in the store. Only three machines exist; the others are in a mall in Arcadia, California, and in Brooklyn, New York City.


Remakes and sequels

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. Numerous unauthorized Pac-Man clones appeared soon after its release. The combined sales of counterfeit arcade machines sold nearly as many units as the original Pac-Man, which had sold more than 300,000 machines.

One of the first ports to be released was the much-maligned port for the Atari 2600, which only somewhat resembles the original and was widely criticized for its flickering ghosts, due to the 2600's limited memory and hardware compared to the arcade machine, and several design and implementation choices. Despite the criticism, this version of Pac-Man sold seven million units at $37.95 per copy, and became the best-selling game of all time on the Atari 2600 console. While enjoying initial sales success, Atari had overestimated demand by producing 12 million cartridges, of which 5 million went unsold. The port's poor quality damaged the company's reputation among consumers and retailers, which 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.Coleco's tabletop Mini-Arcade versions of the game yielded 1.5 million units sold in 1982.II Computing listed it tenth on the magazine's list of top Apple II series games as of late 1985, based on sales and market-share data, and in December 1987 alone Mindscape's IBM PC version of Pac-Man sold over 100,000 copies. The game was also released for Atari's 5200 and 8-bit computers, Intellivision, the Commodore 64 and VIC-20, and the 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.
Pac-Man has 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 released mobile versions of Pac-Man for BREW, Java, and iOS, as well as Palm PDAs and Windows Mobile-based devices. A port of Pac-Man for Android can be controlled not only through an Android phone's trackball but through touch gestures or its on-board accelerometer. As of 2010, Namco had sold more than 30 million paid downloads of Pac-Man on BREW in the United States alone.A version of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man was released on the Galaxy Games multi-game cocktail table unit in 1998. The game differed from the original in that players controlled Pac-Man's movement with a trackball instead of a normal arcade joystick.
Microsoft released Microsoft Return of Arcade in 1996 and Microsoft Return of Arcade: Anniversary Edition in 2000, and includes Pac-Man as one of its bundled arcade games.
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 sold a downloadable Windows PC version of Pac-Man in 2009 which also includes an "Enhanced" mode which replaces all of the original sprites with the sprites from Pac-Man Championship Edition. Namco Networks made a downloadable bundle which includes their PC version of Pac-Man and their port of Dig Dug called Namco All-Stars: Pac-Man and Dig Dug.
In 2010, Namco Bandai announced the release of the game on Windows Phone 7 as an Xbox Live game.Pac-Man has numerous sequels and spin-offs, including only one of 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 or even the best in the entire series. Stan Jarocki of Midway stated that Ms. Pac-Man was conceived in response to the original Pac-Man being "the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players" and that it is "our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man." Namco sued Midway for exceeding their license. Eventually, Bally Midway struck a deal with Namco to officially license Ms. Pac-Man as a sequel. Namco today officially owns Ms. Pac-Man in its other releases.
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.

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.
On June 5, 2007, the first Pac-Man World Championship was held in New York City, which brought together ten competitors from eight countries to play the new Pac-Man Championship Edition developed by Tōru Iwatani. Its sequel was released November 2010.
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 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. After finishing the game, the website automatically redirected the user to a search of Pac-Man 30th Anniversary. Companies across the world experienced slight drops in productivity due to the game, estimated to be valued at the time as $120,000,000 . However, The Official ASTD Blog noted that the total loss, "spread out across the entire world isn't a huge loss, comparatively speaking". In total, the game devoured around 4.8 million hours of work productivity that day. Some organizations even temporarily blocked Google's website from workplace computers the Friday it was uploaded, particularly where it violated regulations against recreational games. Because of the popularity of the Pac-Man doodle, Google later allowed access to the game through a separate web page. On March 31, 2015, Google Maps added an option allowing a Pac-Man style game to be played using streets on the map as the maze.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 Pac-Man game using the language and uploading it to Scratch's official website.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.In 2016 an in-app version of Pac-Man was introduced in Facebook Messenger. This allows users to play the game against their friends while talking over Facebook.
On June 10, 2014, Pac-Man was confirmed to appear as a playable character in the game Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. The 3DS version also has a stage based on the original arcade game, called Pac-Maze. A Pac-Man Amiibo figurine was also released by Nintendo on May 29, 2015.
Super Impulse has released stand-alone Tiny Arcade versions of Pac-Man along with Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian and Space Invaders.


References


Further reading
Trueman, Doug . "The History of Pac-Man". GameSpot. Archived from the original on June 26, 2009. Comprehensive coverage on the history of the entire series up through 1999.
Müller, Martijn . "Tōru Iwatani on how Pac-Man came to be". NG-Gamer.
Morris, Chris . "Pac Man Turns 25". Love Balls
. CNN Money. Sniper Shooter: Gun Shooting
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Vargas, Jose Antonio . Hungry Shark World
. "Still Love at First Bite: At 25, Pac-Man Remains a Hot Pursuit". PAC-MAN
. The Washington Post. Home Design Story
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Hirschfeld, Tom. How to Master the Video Games, Bantam Books, 1981. ISBN 0-553-20164-6 Arcade strategy guide to several games including incarnations of Pac-Man. Includes hand drawings of some of the common patterns for use in the arcade Pac-Man. 1982 edition ISBN 0-553-20195-6 covers home versions.