Happy Birthday, Pac Man

TWIT would like to wish Pac Man a happy 25th birthday.  Boy, that makes me feel old.  It seems just like yesterday my high school friends and I were at Pizza Inn, wearing our Members Only jackets and Topsider deck shoes as we shoveled quarter after quarter into the Pac Man video game. 

Arguably the most influential video game in history (with Pong the only other real contender), Pac Man has made more than $100 million dollars one quarter at a time. He's spawned his own line of trading cards, lunch boxes, board games, breakfast cereals and been the inspiration for a Top 40 hit (Buckner & Garcia's "Pac Man Fever" hit number 9 on Billboard's charts in 1982).

Pac Man was born from an idea by Toru Iwatani. Iwatani, who was also responsible for the arcade classic Galaxian, was trying to come up with a game that looked like a cartoon. At a pizza parlor, he paused after eating his first slice of pizza and thought the remainder of the pie looked like a head with its mouth open. He imagined it racing through a maze, eating things -- and the phenomenon was born. Iwatani had originally wanted the game character to be an actual pizza, but this was at the birth of the video game industry and there were technological limitations. The game also underwent a name change.  It was originally called Puck Man.  I don't think I need to explain why they changed the name to Pac Man. 

We read about people camping out to be first in line when a new Play Station or X Box system comes out, and we hear about how many hundreds of thousands of Grand Theft Auto games are sold.  That's not really impressive compared to Pac Man.  Video game researchers estimate that Pac Man had been played over 10 billion times in the 20th century.  And in Japan, when the arcade game was first released, the country reported a major shortage of yen coins, because everybody was playing it. Now THAT'S impressive. 

The next time we play a game at Pogo.com or any other game site, or when we buy a game for our system at home, let's all give props to Pac Man.  Without that little yellow fellow, we probably would still be playing the old table tennis video game.  Wocka wocka wocka.