Though many games before and after Pac-Man have replicated some of these features, very few have been able to replicate all of them. “We used to compare Pac-Man scores in school like the youngsters of today compare GMAT scores,” he says.Įxperts attribute Pac-Man’s multi-decade success to many individual reasons - uncomplicated gameplay, quirky theme music, easy-to-use controls and a non-threatening game environment that appealed to adults, including women. So powerful was the game’s appeal, he adds, that Pac-Man game scores became the de-facto “currency of competitiveness” during the 1980s in schools. “Pac-Man is like the Bible of gaming,” says Alok Kejriwal, the co-founder and CEO of Games2win, one of the largest video game developers in India. That small act saved the game from spray paint and ridicule, in return for unprecedented success and admiration. Fortunately Midway executives were able to imagine what young players armed with a spray-can would do to arcade game machines named “Puckman”, so they renamed it “Pac-Man”. The enemies were four animated blobs, called “ghosts”, which kept crisscrossing the maze in search of Puckman.Īfter lacklustre adoption in Japan, the game headed out to the USA in 1981 through licensor Midway Games. Iwatani’s game involved a yellow blob racing through a maze, gobbling up the dots in its path. ![]() ![]() ![]() Ultimately, it was the choice of a few letters that turned Pac-Man into one of the world’s most successful video games ever, instead of an ideal target for adolescent vandals.įor “Puckman” was the name coined by young Toru Iwatani, a designer with Japanese video game developer Namco, for the central character of an offbeat game he came up with in 1980.
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