Pac-Man - On this day

In the early beginnings of the video game industry, the focus was not on characters but activity, that is, just playing. Games like Pong, Space Invaders, and Asteroids dominated the market in the 1970s, but then on this day in 1980, a very important thing happened in Japan. A game came out whose name was also the name of the main character.

The so-called Pac-Man was the work of 24-year-old Toru Iwatani who wanted to make a non-violent game for arcade machines for Namco. His goal was to design a game that would also appeal to the female population who were not particularly interested in video games at the time. The Pac-Man character originated from a pizza missing one piece (the part that forms the mouth of the yellow character), but that was only part of the inspiration.

Pac-Man was placed in a maze where he had to eat all the dots while avoiding enemies. The concept of feeding to become stronger was taken from the then cartoon about sailor Popeye who would become stronger by consuming spinach.

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In the same year, 1980, Pac-Man headed to the American market, where it was initially supposed to be called Puck-Man, because it looked similar to the puck used in hockey. However, the game's publishers feared that Puck-Man would be renamed a fairly simple version, so they eventually named it Pac-Man.

When Pac-Man came into circulation, the video game world saw nothing like it. Yellow Eater quickly became the most important game in the history of arcade machines. It attracted so many people and was so popular that it was located outside of traditional playrooms - in shops and even in mortuaries. The popularity quickly went beyond the scope of the video game itself, so the US was flooded with a bunch of different Pac-Man products in the early 1980s. Suffice it to say that Pac-Man then had its toilet lids and that it got its show and animated series on TV.

Pac-Man is remembered as the game that found its way onto the most arcade machines in the history of the video game industry - a total of 293,832. Later, the Yellow Eater appeared on several home consoles, including the Atari 2600 which offered an inferior version of the game, but that didn’t bother customers and it sold 7 million copies, a record result of the time. Pac-Man inherited Ms. on arcade machines. Pac-Man, an unofficial creation that was even more popular.

Pac-Man originally had 256 levels and the highest possible score of 3,333,360 points. It took nineteen years to achieve that result, and it was the first successful player named Billy Mitchell to play the game for six hours in a row. In the meantime, the same thing was achieved by seven other players, the fastest of whom was David Rice, crossing the game in 3 hours, 28 minutes, and 49 seconds.