Miscellaneous

Pac-Man's career in short:
Pac-Man, Bally/Midway, 1980. Licensed from the company Namco Pac-Man is the most played of all the electronic games on the earth. It is converted to over 1000 different hardware platforms all ataripacover the world. One of them, Atari made a port to their 2600 cartridge game system [see left] whitch became very popular. Soon every game console made had it's own clone of the game. Bringing the game into family homes made the popularity soar even higher. By now Pac-Man was well known by everyone, young as old worldwide. This was the start of a whole new industry of Pac-Man related things. The Pac-Mania had begun; Pac-Man appeared at the frontcover of Time Magazine and the comic Mad [see left] as well as spawning a TV-based,cornflakes Saturday-morning cartoon and a hit song. Even a corn-flakes firm used the never-ending gobbler Pac-Man as a mascot to market their product. [see right]
Game backgrounder:
[pacman] Designed by Toru Iwantani. Programmed by Hideyuki Mokajima and crew Pacman was conceived at lunchtime...literally. The designer was very hungry, and ordered a whole pizza for himself. He took one slice, and Pacman was born. The name Pacman is derived from the Japanese slang word "paku-paku", which means "to eat". The game was called "Puckman" in Japan, but due to American's predilection with changing words to vulgarities by scratching part of the word off (Puck to..well, you know), it was changed to Pacman. To give the game some tension, some clever AI was programmed into the game. The ghosts would group up, attack the player, then disperse. Each ghost had its own AI. Blinky chases Pacman, Pinky is positioned a few dots in front of Pacman's mouth. The others move randomly. The game took 1 1/2 years to complete, and had five people on its team. Pacman is the greatest selling arcade game of all time, and is arguably the most well-known video character. It had its own cartoon, lunch box, board game, and hundreds of other products. Pacman was also the first game to have a "character", and changed the face of video games forever. Pacman was the first video game to be as equally popular to women as it was with men. (Thanks to Jeff Mercer for the Iwatani interview transcript, from which most of this trivia was taken.)
The official Pac-Man description.
Original description

Entertainment
Wanna play Pac-Man right away ?

Then try this java-game

Remember to have the macromedia plug-in installed !

Click me for Java-pac !
Haven't heard the Pac-Man fever song yet ?

Download/play this RA-file now : Pac-Man fever
(make sure you've got the Realplayer plug-in)

NB! This song and lyrics are the properties of Buckner/Garcia.

Game Collage
The intermediate cartoons :
1. animation
 
The chase...                    ...and the BIG revenge
2. animation
 
An obstacle !                    ...and a patched ghost
3. animation
 
Still hunting, before...     ...crawling back, beaten

Ghost personality
This is the original NAMCO(tm) ghost characters. Notice the japanese names and their relative nicknames. Both the color and the graphics differs from the US ones.These four cartoon-like figures all had their own independent personality.
Bally/Midway had their own names based on a translation of the japanese original. 'Character' indicates the behaviour and personality of each of the ghosts, whereas the 'nickname' says something about the ghosts outlook.

Pac-Man's personality
Pac Man's character is difficult to explain even to the Japanese -- he is an innocent character. He hasn't been educated to discern between good and evil. He acts more like a small child than a grown-up person.  Think of him as a child learning in the course of his daily activities. If some one tells him guns are evil, he would be the type to rush out and eat guns. But he would most probably eat any gun, even the pistols of policemen who need them.                               
-- Toru Iwatani,
author of Pac-Man

The fruit collection   Ghosts eyes   Cage facilities    Line of aim    Tunnel Escape
     

The cage is the ghosts home. Pac-Man have no access here !
  
The ghosts are always looking in their moving directions.
  
Each stage has it's own fruit. The picture above shows the fruit-bar located under the maze itself, with the left-most fruit indicating current stage..    Whenever you eat a ghost it's eyes (their soul?) will return to the cage where the ghost will respawn(incarnation?), and begin hunting you again.          When things gets a little hot on your tail the tunnel let's you regain the lead. This is it. The fun is gone. You've used up all your Pac-Men. Did'nt get the highscore ? There's only one thing to do; feed the slot with more coins
Pac-Man with legs !
Legs
Modify and make your own
Getting bored ? Not satisfied with
the original graphics in Pac-man ?
Visit
http://odyssy.net/users/snakepit/index.html
Here is an example  :
Electric cowboy
This is called 'Electric Cowboy'
Pac-Man for music
Using Winamp ?
Here's a nice skin for You to use :
 Pac-Amp !
So, you're playing MP.3-files ?
Then you'll probably be excited to hear Techno-Pac in MPEG-1 layer 3 format :
 Techno-Pac
Mastering the game
All things must come to an end !
This is what it looks like beating the game :
Beating Pac-man
Everyone can do this. You only got to stay alive to level 256 !
Official Midway commercial

Take me Back to the main Pac-page.