42 Fun Facts About Pac-Man

Under what title was Pac-Man originally released in Japan?

Puck Man was renamed for America out of fear that vandals would scratch the P on the cabinet into an F and turn the title into a swear word.

Which Namco designer created Pac-Man?

Toru Iwatani had joined Namco hoping to build pinball machines; told he could not, he made pinball-style video games instead, starting with the company's first, Gee Bee, in 1978.

Which audience did Pac-Man's designer specifically hope to attract with a cute, non-violent game?

Women were the target: he saw arcades as dark places full of alien-shooting games for men, and hoped that drawing in women and couples would make them cheerful.

Pac-Man's shape is famously said to have been inspired by what?

A pizza with a slice missing is the story the game's designer has told for decades, though he has also called it only half true: the shape came too from rounding off the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi.

Which ghost is orange?

Clyde switches between chasing Pac-Man and running away depending on how close he gets.

Which ghost gives direct chase to Pac-Man rather than trying to cut him off?

Blinky gets more dangerous as a level empties: once only a few dots are left he speeds up, a mode players nicknamed Cruise Elroy.

Namco's president originally wanted all four ghosts to be what?

Company president Masaya Nakamura wanted all the ghosts to be the same shade of red; the designer argued for different colours and his colleagues backed him unanimously in a vote.

The power pellet that lets Pac-Man turn on the ghosts was inspired by which cartoon character?

Popeye and his spinach gave the designer the idea of a snack that turns the tables on a bully; he thought of the pellets as power cookies.

Which American cartoon ghost did Pac-Man's designer name as an inspiration for the four ghosts?

Casper was one model and Q-Taro, a friendly ghost from Japanese comics, the other, which is why Pac-Man's enemies were drawn to look cuddly instead of frightening.

Just before a power pellet wears off, Pac-Man's frightened blue ghosts flash which colour as a warning?

White flashes are the cue to back off, because the ghosts turn dangerous again a moment later; on later levels they barely stay blue at all.

Which Namco shooter was at first more popular than Pac-Man in Japanese arcades?

Galaxian, a space shooter, felt familiar to the mostly male arcade crowd, while Pac-Man's cute maze puzzled them at first; by the end of 1980 Pac-Man was Japan's top-earning arcade game.

Guinness World Records credits Pac-Man with which arcade record?

Most machines installed: Guinness counted 293,822 Pac-Man cabinets, named it the most successful coin-operated game and presented the record to the game's creator in person.

An integer overflow makes which Pac-Man stage impossible, producing the kill screen?

Level 256 is the kill screen: an 8-bit counter overflows, the right half of the maze becomes a garbled mess of symbols, and too few dots remain to finish it.

What is a perfect score on the original arcade Pac-Man?

A perfect score is 3,333,360: every dot, energiser, fruit and blue ghost on every level without losing a life, plus the few dots that can still be reached on the broken final screen.

Who was the first person to achieve a publicly verified perfect Pac-Man score, in July 1999?

Billy Mitchell recorded the first verified perfect game on July 3, 1999, at Funspot in New Hampshire; Twin Galaxies struck his records in 2018, and Guinness reinstated them in 2020.

Which US president wrote to eight-year-old Jeffrey Yee to congratulate him on an impossible Pac-Man score?

Ronald Reagan's letter praised a claimed score of more than six million points, a total that would mean clearing the game's unbeatable final level, which nobody has ever been seen to do.

Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unlicensed enhancement kit for Pac-Man under what name?

Crazy Otto was an add-on kit for Pac-Man machines; after legal trouble with Atari its makers could not sell such kits freely, so they took it to Pac-Man's US distributor, which reworked it into Ms. Pac-Man.

In Ms. Pac-Man the orange ghost is renamed what?

Sue took over the orange ghost's slot in Ms. Pac-Man; later games brought the original back alongside her and turned Sue purple so the two could be told apart.

Which firm developed Ms. Pac-Man, the first Pac-Man game that Namco did not make itself?

General Computer Corporation began by selling add-on boards for other firms' arcade games; Atari sued over one, then dropped the case and hired the company to make games for it instead.

Which duo had a top-ten US hit in 1982 with the novelty song "Pac-Man Fever"?

Buckner & Garcia took 'Pac-Man Fever' to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1982; they wrote it after discovering the game in a Marietta, Georgia restaurant.

Which animation studio made the Pac-Man cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings from 1982?

Hanna-Barbera gave Pac-Man a wife, a baby, a dog and a cat, and a villain who sends the ghosts out to find the forest the power pellets come from.

Where in Pac-Man's maze do the ghosts slow down sharply, giving a player the chance to shake them off?

In the side tunnels a ghost's speed is cut almost in half while Pac-Man keeps his own, so a dash through one opens up a gap.

Which pioneering first-person shooter hides a secret level laid out as a Pac-Man maze?

Wolfenstein 3D pays the tribute because its level designer John Romero calls Pac-Man the biggest influence on his career, and the game's grid-based maps owe something to its maze.

What are the dots called in the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?

Video wafers are what Atari's version calls the dots, with power pills for the energisers and a vitamin for the bonus item; its ghosts flicker because only one of the four is drawn in each frame.

Pac-Man appeared in a film shown at the closing ceremony of which Olympic Games?

Rio 2016's closing ceremony included Japan's handover film for Tokyo 2020, in which Pac-Man makes a cameo before Japan's prime minister pops out of a pipe dressed as Super Mario.

Which Nintendo designer created Pac-Man Vs. for GameCube as a GBA link cable demo?

Shigeru Miyamoto devised Pac-Man Vs. in 2003 to show off GameCube-GBA connectivity: one player steers Pac-Man on the Game Boy Advance screen while up to three others chase him as ghosts on the TV.

Which 2007 Xbox 360 game was the last one the original designer of Pac-Man worked on?

Pac-Man Championship Edition was its designer's farewell: unhappy with earlier remakes, he split the maze into two halves that refill as you clear them and set the whole game against the clock.

Pac-Man 99 pitted 99 online players against each other in 2021 on which console?

Nintendo Switch subscribers got it as a sibling of Tetris 99; the servers were switched off in October 2023, though anyone who had bought its paid extras can still play offline.

Which company marked Pac-Man's 30th anniversary in 2010 with a playable version on its website?

Google's logo became a working Pac-Man maze on 21 May 2010, and so many people wanted to keep playing that the company gave the game a permanent page of its own two days later.

Which New York institution added Pac-Man to its permanent collection in 2012?

The Museum of Modern Art took in 14 video games in 2012 as works of design, Pac-Man among them, as the start of a planned collection of about 40.

In business jargon, what happens in a "Pac-Man defense"?

The target tries to buy its bidder, as Pac-Man turns on the ghosts after a power pellet; in 1982 Martin Marietta answered Bendix's hostile bid by buying up Bendix shares.

Which novel sends its teenage hero to a hidden arcade, where a flawless game of Pac-Man wins him a mysterious quarter?

Ready Player One has its hero find a Pac-Man cabinet in a hidden replica arcade; the quarter he wins for a flawless game later turns out to be an extra life, and it saves him.

In which film does a giant Pac-Man rampage through a city while its real-life designer appears in a cameo?

In Pixels, Denis Akiyama plays Pac-Man's creator, who pleads with a giant rogue Pac-Man, while the real designer appears briefly as an arcade technician.

Which 1984 Namco side-scroller, based on the Pac-Man cartoon, is credited with paving the way for Super Mario Bros.?

Pac-Land took its look from the American TV cartoon and its controls from Konami's Track & Field, with buttons in place of a joystick for running and jumping.

Which fighting series added Pac-Man as a playable guest in its fourth instalment?

Super Smash Bros. brought Pac-Man in for its 2014 Nintendo 3DS and Wii U games, which the character's owners helped Nintendo to build.

Which 2011 arcade game had four players compete as coloured Pac-Men to be the last one standing?

Pac-Man Battle Royale puts up to four differently coloured Pac-Men in one maze until a single one is left; it was made for the series' 30th anniversary, and a sequel, Chompionship, followed in 2022.

Pac-Man was designed as a break from the wave of shooting games set off by which arcade hit?

Space Invaders had set off a flood of alien-shooting games; Pac-Man, designed as the opposite of all that, pulled arcades toward cute character games instead.

Namco, the maker of Pac-Man, merged in 2005 with which Japanese company?

Bandai, best known for toys, joined Namco to form what was then Japan's third-largest games company, behind only Nintendo and Sega Sammy.

Pac-Man's designer began the 17-month project from which single keyword?

Eat, taberu in Japanese, was the word he started from, wanting a game about food instead of fighting; it took a year and five months to finish.

Which 1979 Atari game did Pac-Man overtake as the best-selling arcade game in the US?

Asteroids was the biggest arcade seller Atari ever had, and it had only just taken the American crown itself when Pac-Man passed it inside a year.

Historian Steven Kent blames Atari's Pac-Man and which 1982 film tie-in for wrecking Atari's reputation?

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was overproduced just as Pac-Man had been; Pac-Man at least sold about eight million copies, the most of any Atari 2600 game, before the unsold stock piled up.

After leaving Namco, Pac-Man's creator took up which second career?

University professor: he left in 2007 for Tokyo Polytechnic University, and says the old story that he quit in anger at getting no bonus for Pac-Man is untrue.