The Think Tank

I don’t know about you, but I was a total Pac-Man kid:  When I was three my birthday cake was Pac-Man; The first game I ever played on my Atari 2600 was Pac-Man; I wiled away countless hours playing with my Pac-Man game watch; I tuned in every Saturday morning to watch the Pac-Man cartoon show.  The first really expensive thing I ever bought was a portable Pac-Man game which was vaguely Pac-Man shaped and cost $50 dollars.  At the time my allowance was $5 a week, so it took me a total of 10 weeks to save up for it.  I need not tell you that 10 whole weeks to a five or six year old is roughly equatable to two or three life times.

Today we celebrate because the the 1980 icon and childhood hero turns 30 years old.

The game was invented by Namco in Japan by a fellow named Tōru Iwatani.  Work began with a nine-person team in 1979 and took about a year to complete.  The original name was Pakkuman, derived from the Japanese slang word to describe chomping your teeth together.  Iwatani originally said that the shape was inspired by a pizza missing a single slice, but in 1986 he admitted that it was also inspired by rounding out the Japanese character for “mouth”, which is roughly square.

Pac-Man’s eternal nemeses were originally referred to as “monsters” but in 1982 when Atari made the first official port for their 2600 game system, the pale, flickering shapes were called “ghosts” and that moniker stuck.  Their names as originally designed were (translated to English): Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle, and Stupid.  When the game was released in the United States, the names were changed to Shadow, Speedy, Bashful and Pokey, although the more popular nick-names of Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are how most fans think of them.

Iwatani programmed each ghost to have its own, unique personality, so that each ghost would travel at different speeds and react in different ways to make gameplay less predictable and therefore more entertaining.

Despite Iwatani’s efforts, the game was not received well in Japan when it was released, being outdone by the wildly popular Space Invaders and Asteroids.  Later that same year Pakkuman was released in English speaking countries under the name Puck Man.  But, in the US it was feared that the “P” would be vandalized and turned into an “F”, so the name was changed to Pac-Man. A few Puck Man cabinets can be found to this day in Europe.

Pac-Man took the American video game market by storm, quickly outstripping  Space Invaders and Asteroids by appealing to a much broader demographic than the teenage males who swarmed to the space-based games.  In fact, marketing executives completely overlooked both Pac-Man and the now-classic Defender in favor of a racing game called Rally-X, which they thought would be the big seller in 1980.  They were wrong.  Pac-Man would go on to sell more than 350,000 cabinet units, making it the most popular game of its time.

One year later General Computer Corporation invented Crazy Otto, an unofficial hack of Pac-Man that they sold to Midway without Namco’s authorization.  Namco filed a lawsuit and eventually a compromise was reached which led to Namco releasing the game as a sequel, named Ms. Pac-Man.  Many people view this version of the game as superior to the original and possibly the best in the whole series.

Unlike many video games of yore, the popularity of Pac-Man has endured.  It has been ported for the Apple II series, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers, IBM Personal Computer, Intellivision, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System (1987 and 1990 by Tengen, and 1993 by Namco) and the Texas Instruments 99/4a.  It has also made many appearances for handheld game console systems: it was released on the Game Boy (1991), Sega Game Gear (1991), and the Neo Geo Pocket Color (1999).  In more recent times our little yellow superstar has debuted on most every version of smartphone available.  I personally have played Pac-Man on  my Blackberry and iPhone, and yesterday I even played it on the first-ever interactive Google logo.

No matter what platform you play on, Pac-Man technically has no end.  With each successive level the ghosts get quicker and the amount of time they are vulnerable after Pac-Man consumes a power-pellet gets shorter, until eventually they are completely immune.  But, despite those hardships, if you were skilled enough you could conceivably continue to drive your little yellow chomper around the maze until you dropped dead of either a heart attack or boredom.

In 1982 eight year old Jeffery R. Lee was personally congratulated by President Raegan for achieving the highest Pac-Man score ever: 6,131,940 points. This score is disputed however, because it can not have been accomplished without defeating the so-called “split screen level”.

Thanks to a bug in the original coding the games 256th level is messed up, with random images and shapes displayed along the right side and bottom row of the maze.   Since large portions of the maze are unnavigable, this level cannot officially be defeated.  The problem for young Mr. Lee is that his score of six million plus points cannot be achieved without surpassing the 256th level.  For this reason, Lee’s score is not considered “official” and does not count as a record.

Officially, a perfect score is considered to be the maximum number of points you can achieve by completing the first 255 levels plus as many points as you can get on the visible portion of the split screen level: a total of 3,333,360 points.

The first person to achieve this feat while being observed by independent observers was Florida resident Billy Mitchell in 1999, with a time of just over six hours.  Ten years later, in 2009, the appropriately named David Race of Ohio became the sixth and fastest person to max out Pac-Man, doing it in 3:41:22.

After setting his record score in 1999, Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 dollars to anyone who could provably pass the split screen level before the beginning of the new Millennium.  No one ever collected the prize.