Pac-Man

Title	Pac-Man
Caption	North American Flyer
Width	300px
Developer	Namco
Publisher	Namco, Midway
Designer	Tōru Iwatani – Game designerShigeo Funaki () – ProgrammerToshio Kai () – Sound & Music
Composer	Toshio Kai
Released
Genre	Maze
Modes	Up to two players, alternating turns
Ratings	ESRB: EOFLC: G
Platforms	Arcade
Input	4-way joystick
Cabinet	Standard upright, mini-upright and cocktail
Arcade system	Namco Pac-Man
Cpu
Sound	1× Namco WSG (3-channel mono) @ 3.072 MHz
Display	Vertically oriented, 224 × 288, 16 palette colors}}

is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture. Upon its release, the game—and, subsequently, Pac-Man derivatives—became a social phenomenon that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among other things, an animated television series and a top-ten hit single.

When Pac-Man was released, the most popular arcade video games were space shooters, in particular Space Invaders and Asteroids. The most visible minority were sports games that were mostly derivative of Pong. Pac-Man succeeded by creating a new genre and appealing to both genders. Pac-Man is often credited with being a landmark in video game history, and is among the most famous arcade games of all time. It is also the highest-grossing video game of all time, as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs. According to the Davie-Brown Index, Pac-Man has the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers, recognized by 94 percent of them. Pac-Man is one of the longest running video game franchises from the golden age of video arcade games, and one of only three video games that are on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. (along with Pong and Dragon's Lair).

Gameplay

The player controls Pac-Man through a maze, eating pac-dots. When all dots are eaten, Pac-Man is taken to the next stage, between some stages one of three intermission animations plays. Four enemies (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde) roam the maze, trying to catch Pac-Man. If an enemy touches Pac-Man, a life is lost. When all lives have been lost, the game ends. Pac-Man is awarded a single bonus life at 10,000 points by default—DIP switches inside the machine can change the required points or disable the bonus life altogether. Near the corners of the maze are four larger, flashing dots known as power pellets that provide Pac-Man with the temporary ability to eat the enemies. The enemies turn deep blue, reverse direction and usually move more slowly. When an enemy is eaten, its eyes remain and return to the center box where it is regenerated in its normal color. Blue enemies flash white before they become dangerous again and the amount of time the enemies remain vulnerable varies from one stage to the next, but the time period generally becomes shorter as the game progresses. In later stages, the enemies don't change colors at all, but still reverse direction when a power pellet is eaten.

Enemies

The enemies in Pac-Man are known variously as "ghosts" and "monsters". Despite the seemingly random nature of the enemies, their movements are strictly deterministic, which players have used to their advantage. In an interview, creator Toru Iwatani stated that he had designed each enemy with its own distinct personality in order to keep the game from becoming impossibly difficult or boring to play. More recently, Iwatani described the enemy behaviors in more detail at the 2011 Game Developers Conference. He stated that the red enemy chases Pac-Man, and the pink and blue enemies try to position themselves in front of Pac-Man's mouth. While he claimed that the orange enemy's behavior is random, a careful analysis of the game's code reveals that it actually chases Pac-Man most of the time, but also moves toward the lower-left corner of the maze when Pac-Man is facing a certain direction.

Split-screen

Pac-Man was designed to have no ending – as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to play the game indefinitely. However, a bug keeps this from happening: Normally, no more than seven fruits are displayed at the bottom of the screen at any one time. But when the internal level counter, which is stored in a single byte, reaches 255, the subroutine that draws the fruits erroneously "rolls over" this number to zero, causing it to try to draw 256 fruits instead of the usual seven. This corrupts the bottom of the screen and the entire right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making it impossible to eat enough dots to beat the level. Because this effectively ends the game, this "split-screen" level is often referred to as the "kill screen". Emulators and code analysis have revealed what would happen should this 255th level be cleared: The fruits and intermissions would restart at level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages.

Perfect play

A perfect Pac-Man game occurs when the player achieves the maximum possible score on the first 255 levels (by eating every possible dot, power pellet, fruit, and enemy) without losing a single life, and then scoring as many points as possible in the last level. As verified by the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard on July 3, 1999, the first person to achieve this maximum possible score (3,333,360 points) was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida, who performed the feat in about six hours.

In September 2009, David Race of Beavercreek, Ohio, became the sixth person to achieve a perfect score. His time of 3 hours, 41 minutes, and 22 seconds set a new record for the fastest time to obtain a perfect score.

In December 1982, an 8-year-old boy, Jeffrey R. Yee, supposedly received a letter from U.S. President Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a worldwide record of 6,131,940 points, a score only possible if he had passed the Split-Screen Level. where paku-paku describes (the sound of) the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.

Although Iwatani has repeatedly stated that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice, Iwatani attempted to appeal to a wider audience—beyond the typical demographics of young boys and teenagers. This led him to add elements of a maze, as well as cute ghost enemy characters. The result was a game he named Puck Man.

Later in 1980, the game was picked up for manufacture in the United States by Bally division Midway,

Impact and legacy

When first launched in Japan by Namco in 1980, the game received a lukewarm response, as Space Invaders and other similar games were more popular at the time. The appeal of Pac-Man was such that the game caught on immediately with the public; it quickly became far more popular than anything seen in the game industry up to that point. Pac-Man outstripped Asteroids as the best-selling arcade game in North America, where it would sell more than 350,000 arcade cabinets (retailing at around $2400 each) for $1 billion within 18 months, Towards the end of the 20th century, the game's total gross in quarters had been estimated at more than 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion), equivalent to over $3.4 billion in 2011,

The game is regarded as one of the most influential video games of all time, for a number of reasons: its titular character was the first original gaming mascot, the game established the maze chase game genre, it demonstrated the potential of characters in video games, it opened gaming to female audiences, and it was gaming's first licensing success. In addition, it was the first video game to feature power-ups, and it was the first game to feature cut scenes, in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and the ghosts chasing each other around during those interludes. It has since had an influence on many future titles, ranging from the early stealth game Metal Gear (where guards chase Solid Snake in a similar manner to Pac-Man when he is spotted), to the sandbox game Grand Theft Auto (where the player runs over pedestrians and gets chased by police in a similar manner), to early first-person shooters such as MIDI Maze (which had similar maze-based gameplay and character designs), Wolfenstein 3D (which was similar in level design and featured a Pac-Man level from a first-person perspective) and Doom (with its similar emphasis on mazes, power-ups, killing monsters, and reaching the next level).

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.

One of the first ports to be released was the much maligned port for the Atari 2600. The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man only somewhat resembled the original, and its flickering ghosts were widely criticized. Despite the criticism, it sold seven million units,

It was also released for the Apple II series, Atari's 5200 and 8-bit computers, IBM Personal Computer, Intellivision, the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 and Nintendo Entertainment System. For handheld game consoles, it was released on the Game Boy, Sega Game Gear and the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

The game has also 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 also released mobile versions for BREW, Java, 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.

In addition, 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-Mans 25th anniversary in 2005, Namco released a revision that officially featured all three games.

In 2010 Namco Bandai has announced that they are releasing this game on Windows Phone 7 as an Xbox Live game.

Pac-Man's spawned sequels and spin-offs includes only one 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, and even the best in the entire series.

(2007)]] 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 and Tōru Iwatani-developed Pac-Man Championship Edition and its sequel.

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, though the reported $120 million total loss "spread out across the entire world isn't a huge loss, comparatively speaking". Some organizations even temporarily blocked Google's website from workplace computers on the Friday it was uploaded, particularly where it violated regulations against recreational games. Because of the popularity of the Pac-Man doodle, Google decided to allow access to the game through a separate web page.

In popular culture

Pac-Man went on to become an icon of video game culture during the 1980s, and a wide variety of Pac-Man merchandise was marketed with the character's image, from t-shirts and toys to hand-held video game imitations and even specially shaped pasta. An animated TV series produced by Hanna–Barbera aired on ABC from 1982 to 1983. The Killer List of Videogames lists Pac-Man as the #1 video game on its "Top 10 Most Popular Video games" list. At one time, a feature film based on the game was also in development. In 2010, a computer-generated animated series was reported to be in the works.

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 world wide: 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. Their Pac-Man Fever album also received a Gold certification for selling over a million records. "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a song titled "Pac-Man" that was a parody of The Beatles' "Taxman", in 1981. Hip hop emcee Lil' Flip sampled sounds from the game Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to make his top-20 single "Game Over". Namco America filed a lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment for unauthorized use of these samples. The suit was eventually settled out of court.

The game has also 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 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.

References

Further reading

Trueman, Doug (November 10, 1999). "The History of Pac-Man". GameSpot. Comprehensive coverage on the history of the entire series up through 1999.

Müller, Martijn (June 3, 2010). "Tōru Iwatani on how Pac-Man came to be". NG-Gamer.

Morris, Chris (May 10, 2005). "Pac Man Turns 25". CNN Money.

Vargas, Jose Antonio (June 22, 2005). "Still Love at First Bite: At 25, Pac-Man Remains a Hot Pursuit". The Washington Post.

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 covers home versions.

External links

Pac-man 30th Anniversary website

Twin Galaxies' High-Score Rankings for Pac-Man

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