MadCap's Game Reviews - "Pac-Man"

The year of the 40th anniversary of one of gaming's most prominent and well-remembered franchises (and one day after it's original Japanese release date)? A video game that is definitively remembered as a hallmark of 1980's culture? An incredibly addictive maze chase game that not only effectively created the genre, but has catchy music and attention-grabbing use of color in its designs?

A game that spawned one of the worst songs ever written?

Well, you knew I'd have to look at it, didn't you?


Pac-Man is the brainchild of Toru Iwatani. Iwatani looked at Popeye the Sailor and thought "what if I made this more colorful, changed the spinach to pills, and added rad techno music?", and a legend was born. I joke, but that is essentially what happened, and it was a pretty revolutionary idea for the time it was made. After it had spent almost a year and a half in development, Pac-Man was originally released for arcades using the then-revolutionary RGB color technology to bring the characters and the environment to life in a way only heavy use of the color spectrum could. Pac-Man was a bright, yellow hockey puck given a mouth. The ghosts that he was chased around the map by were all colorful with incredibly bright, expressive eyes. The sound effects were loud and as attention-grabbing as the graphics, being somewhat like being stuck in a carnival atmosphere without the insane clones running about being "funny".

Also, yes, the game was originally called Pakku-Man and was originally going to be called Puck-Man in North America, but was changed to Pac-Man because Namco was apparently afraid of the P being changed to an F. It's really not important, but I know someone will complain if I don't bring that up, so there it is.

Pac-Man plays pretty well. I personally never played it until the Nintendo 64 port came out (included on a cartidge with a bunch of other titles like Galaga and Dig Dug - yes, I'll probably get to them eventually), being that I was negative eleven years old when Pac-Man originally came out in arcades in 1980. I'm going from that port of it, so if any of this information is wrong from the original least - that's the port's fault.

As Pac-Man, you traverse a maze grid trying to eat all of the pellets within it, all the while trying to dodge the four ghosts within (Oikake, Machibuse, Kimagure, and Otoboke in Japanese or Blinky, Plinky, Inky, and Clyde in English). Interestingly for the time, each of the ghosts were programmed with a separate A.I. so as to keep the gameplay interesting. The different ghosts would behave differently in their attempts to stop Pac-Man.

However, all four of the ghosts would turn blue and run for their lives if Pac-Man gobbled up one of the four Power Pellets in the level, which would make the vulnerable and - if eaten by Pac-Man - they would return to the center of the level and reconstituted as ghosts. Beyond that, they were given designs to differentiate all of them, as I said before, Iwatani thinking that a broad color pallet would make the game more appealing (particularly to women as well - logic that would be used to questionable effect in Ms. Pac-Man some time later).

Also, when the player got a certain amount of points, fruit would show up to be eaten for bonus points or (if you're me) dance tantalizingly around in one of the corners of the map that you're farthest away from before disappearing off-screen never to be seen again because you're too busy running away from the ghosts to get to it.

That's really all there is to this game. You go around the maze, eat up all the pellets, and try to avoid the ghosts while you do. As the levels go on, the Power Pellet vulnerability of the ghosts has less and less of a timer on it and the ghosts move faster, all to capitalize on the 1980s Arcade's debilitating quarter addiction. If you play the home console version (besides Billy Mitchell, I fear anyone who managed it with the arcade version), the game will eventually become unwinnable. There is no actual end, it just keeps going until you die even to the point of half the screen being completely incomprehensible. As I said before, the gameplay is very addictive. Once you pick it up, it's very hard to put it down.

It goes by the same principal as Tetris, although there you have the satisfaction of seeing the lines you've made disappear once you've completed them. Pac-Man, though, never really feels monotonous, at least not to me. It hits that perfect spot that was really only seen in gaming's infancy where a gamer can just let go their conscious self and act on instinct, a simplicity that gaming hasn't had in a long time and will never really be able to achieve again.

It's not intricate and over-complicated, and it doesn't need to be. You just grab the joystick and go, no need for anything more than that.

Maybe this is why Pac-Man has endured for so long as a franchise. After thirty-eight games in the main series (not counting compilations) across more consoles than you can shake a stick at - the most recent of which being in 2019 - it's clear that Pac-Man may not be as popular as he was in the heyday of the 1980's, but he has been more than cemented a permanent fixture in gaming consciousness and in the history of gaming in general. Is it the simple and colorful designs? The catchy music? The addictive gameplay? I have no idea, maybe it was all of those things or any one of them. It may have just been the right idea at the right place at the right time with the right technology. Either way, for a while, Pac-Man was on top of the world.

If you haven't played it by this point, then you really have no excuse. 40 years on, the original Pac-Man can be found on just about everything from the current-gen consoles to your Android or iOS phone. So, happy anniversary to Pac-Man and thanks to Toru Iwatani, Namco and, Midway for bringing to us one of gaming's most enduring icons. Here's to the next 40!

And as for the game: get it, play it, enjoy it!

Pac-Man is now available from Namco and Midway Games on...way, way too many things to list. Seriously, it's absolutely wild!

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