Before the blue
bomber was defeating Mavericks, before a hedgehog was tearing up
asphalt on blast processing machines, before an ape was kidnapping
pretty ladies, and even before an Italian plumber was jumping and
hitting blocks, there was a yellow puck with a mouth named PAC-MAN.
That's right, just in time for the recent SSB4 announcement, today
we're looking at one of the most iconic symbols of video games of all
time.
A 1980 Maze game
developed by Tōru Iwatani over at Namco. He noticed that video games
at the time were mostly space shooters, as Space Invaders and
Asteroids were the two most popular games at the time. He also
noticed that all of them were directed at teenage boys. Wanting to
appeal to a wider demographic, he wanted to make a game that could be
appealing to women and children. So, he thought, what do women and
children like? Well they like cute things, they like desserts, mazes
and eating. One day, while he was eating a pizza, he noticed that a
pizza with one slice removed looked like a head with it's mouth open,
that's when inspiration struck. Why don't we make a game that looks
and even feels more like a cartoon, where you play as an animated
pizza looking guy that eats everything on the screen and have cute
little ghosts chase you around a maze! So when Joe brings his new
girlfriend to the arcade to show off his mad skills at Defender
she'll see the cute Pac-Man game and drag him over and now we're
getting income from both of them! And it worked! The simplicity of
the single joystick and no buttons, combined with the cute visuals
and lack of explosions and violence that we had recently been seeing
more of lead to the game being popular with not only teenage boys,
but younger children and, yes, women. For the first time, women were
starting to be considered a demographic for video games.
The result was
nothing short of phenomenal. The game exploded like nothing the world
had ever seen at the time. It was a HUGE success, by 1990 the the
game grossed over a billion dollars, surpassing the gross revenue of
Star Wars, the highest-grossing movie at the time. To this very day
it is the most popular,and highest-grossing arcade game of all time.
In the wake of it's popularity Pac-Fever struck. For the first time
ever, video games had a mascot. This wasn't the Space Invaders
Turret, or the Asteroids ship, this was a character that you could
look at and say “that's pac-man”. His iconic “missing pizza
slice” design has become a video game icon and according to the
Davie-Brown Index, pac-man has the highest brand awareness of any
video game characters. Everyone knows, Pac-Man, I own roughly 10
T-shirts that I wear in my closest, 8 of those are video game
t-shirts, and of those eight, two of them are Pac-Man shirts, one day
I was walking through walmart wearing one of my Pac-Man shirts, this one, in fact. And a five year old kid looked at my shirt and looked
up at his Mom and I kid you not, said,
“Look Mommy!
That's Pac-Man!”
Even children who's
parents are too young for Pac-Man still know this icon of gaming
culture. Soon after the game's release, a huge variety of Pac-Man
merchandise was marketed with his image, the first time marketing on
this scale had ever happened for a video game. from toys, to books,
to t-shirts, and even Pac-Man Kraft Macaroni and cheese, and a
terrible animated TV series!
Not only was the
game a huge success both from a critical or marketing standpoint. But
it was also surprisingly influential. Not only was pac-man the first
gaming mascot, This game introduced the first cut scenes, something
that nearly all video games these days still use, the first
power-ups, and even invented a genre that was not derived from or
inspired by an already existing game. Guys that is huge. Nearly every
arcade game at that time (especially those on this list) could have
it's ancestry traced back all the way to Pong. Defender was inspired
by Galaxian which was capitalizing on the popularity of Space
Invaders, which was inspired by Breakout, a sequel to Pong. So...
Yeah... Pac-Man is big. Still big today even. Something no other game
developing company can claim as he's even older than Mario.
So how does the most
popular arcade game of all time hold up? Great! The game is truly
timeless, as no matter how far video games advance, the simplicity of
the graphics and the charm of the characters causes this game to
practically never age. There have been tons of Pac-Man clones,
including that abomination that was the 2600 port, but none come
close to being the near timeless gem that Pac-Man is today. People,
if you're one of the unlucky few that have never played Pac-Man in
their life, do yourself a favor and track down an old arcade and
waste some quarters on this. Because not only is this game worth
playing, it is a piece of history that will never be forgotten. For
as long as there are pellets to eat, and a yellow circle with a mouth
to eat them. Pac Fever his here to stay.
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