Pac-Man Trivia
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42 free Pac-Man trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pac-Man is the best-selling arcade game ever made and the first video game character to become a mascot, and this quiz covers the whole franchise from the Namco original to the 2015 endless runner built around its most famous bug. Easy questions ask what the ghosts are called, what the power pellets do and what colour Pac-Man is; harder ones dig into why the Japanese title was changed for America, what inspired the bonus fruit, how the ghosts' personalities differ, how Ms. Pac-Man began as an unlicensed hack, and exactly how many points a perfect game is worth. It works for a retro-gaming night, an 80s-themed pub quiz round or anyone who once fed a week's pocket money into an arcade machine, and the questions run from casual player to arcade historian. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the games, the designer, the cartoon and the records, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 42 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what title was Pac-Man originally released in Japan?
Puck Man
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.
Q 02Which Namco designer created Pac-Man?
Toru Iwatani
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.
Q 03Which audience did Pac-Man's designer specifically hope to attract with a cute, non-violent game?
Women
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.
Q 04Pac-Man's shape is famously said to have been inspired by what?
A pizza with a slice missing
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.
Q 05Which ghost is orange?
Clyde
Clyde switches between chasing Pac-Man and running away depending on how close he gets.
Q 06Which ghost gives direct chase to Pac-Man rather than trying to cut him off?
Blinky
Blinky gets more dangerous as a level empties: once only a few dots are left he speeds up, a mode players nicknamed Cruise Elroy.
Q 07Namco's president originally wanted all four ghosts to be what?
The same shade of red
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.
Q 08The power pellet that lets Pac-Man turn on the ghosts was inspired by which cartoon character?
Popeye
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.
Q 09Which American cartoon ghost did Pac-Man's designer name as an inspiration for the four ghosts?
Casper
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.
Q 10Just before a power pellet wears off, Pac-Man's frightened blue ghosts flash which colour as a warning?
White
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.
Q 11Which Namco shooter was at first more popular than Pac-Man in Japanese arcades?
Galaxian
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.
Q 12Guinness World Records credits Pac-Man with which arcade record?
Most machines installed
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.
Q 13An integer overflow makes which Pac-Man stage impossible, producing the kill screen?
Level 256
Q 21Which animation studio made the Pac-Man cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings from 1982?
Hanna-Barbera
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.
Q 22Where in Pac-Man's maze do the ghosts slow down sharply, giving a player the chance to shake them off?
In the side tunnels
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.
Q 23Which pioneering first-person shooter hides a secret level laid out as a Pac-Man maze?
Wolfenstein 3D
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.
Q 14What is a perfect score on the original arcade Pac-Man?
3,333,360
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.
Q 15Who was the first person to achieve a publicly verified perfect Pac-Man score, in July 1999?
Billy Mitchell
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.
Q 16Which US president wrote to eight-year-old Jeffrey Yee to congratulate him on an impossible Pac-Man score?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 17Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unlicensed enhancement kit for Pac-Man under what name?
Crazy Otto
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.
Q 18In Ms. Pac-Man the orange ghost is renamed what?
Sue
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.
Q 19Which firm developed Ms. Pac-Man, the first Pac-Man game that Namco did not make itself?
General Computer Corporation
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.
Q 20Which duo had a top-ten US hit in 1982 with the novelty song "Pac-Man Fever"?
Buckner & Garcia
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.
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.
Q 24What are the dots called in the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?
Video wafers
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.
Q 25Pac-Man appeared in a film shown at the closing ceremony of which Olympic Games?
Rio 2016
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.
Q 26Which Nintendo designer created Pac-Man Vs. for GameCube as a GBA link cable demo?
Shigeru Miyamoto
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.
Q 27Which 2007 Xbox 360 game was the last one the original designer of Pac-Man worked on?
Pac-Man Championship Edition
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.
Q 28Pac-Man 99 pitted 99 online players against each other in 2021 on which console?
Nintendo Switch
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.
Q 29Which 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.
Q 30Which New York institution added Pac-Man to its permanent collection in 2012?
The Museum of Modern Art
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.