On may 22, 1980, exactly 34 years ago, Namco published one of the best selling games of the videogames’ history, Pac-Man. First released as an arcade machine, during the years it was converted to almost all the home video game platforms and ported to all the 8-bits computers of that time. During the years to follow it was also ported to any game system that was released into the market and today it is still possible to buy it in every major mobile app store.
Bornt after a development of 14 months from an intuition of Tohru Iwatani, the main character of the game was created after seeing a slice was cut away from a pizza, the game in origin would have to be named PuckMan but just before the publishing it was changed into Pac-Man because in the english countries it could be mispelled in “fuckman”.
The hardware of the original arcade was based on what the technology of that time could offer: the then popular Zilog Z80 was choosen to be the CPU, and a custom audio chip from Namco, capable of 3 voices, was choosen to generate the sounds of the game; the graphics was standard for that time, a 224×288 pixels monitor with 16 color. The gameplay was very simple: the main characted was dropped into a maze full of pills to collect while 4 ghosts tried to kill him following pseudo-random pathes: their names were Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. After the level was cleared, the player had to challenge the next one, and so on.
The success of the game was related to several factors: the gameplays was very simple but very involving. The game musics fitted perfectly the game’s scenarios: the main theme was very catchy and the background sound played during the game and the sound of the eaten pills were unique. Moreover, Pac-Man was the first character of a videogame to have his own personality as well as peculiarities that lead him to quickly become the symbol itself of the entire videogame’s world. The colored and “rounded” graphic elements of the game broke with the previous games, that lacked in colors and that offered squared elements. The fortun of Pac-Man was so notable that it is estimated that the game had generated about 2.5 billions dollars of revenues, an amount that put Pac-Man at the very first place of the most profitable titles of all the history of videogames.
