15 Things You Might Not Know About Pac-Man

1) Pac-man was first released in Japan on the 22 May, 1980 by Namco.

2) The design of Pac-man was inspired when Tohru Iwatani, a games designer from Namco, went out for pizza with his friends and ideas then flowed when he saw the pizza with a slice missing, hence the shape of Pac-man.

3) Pac-man was initially called Puck-man but because ‘Puck’ resembled an expletive, it was changed.

4) The small dots that Pac-man has to eat are called pac-dots. The bigger ones that speed Pac-man up are known as power pellets.

5) Pac-man travels 20% faster in areas where the pac-dots are eaten but slows down while eating pac-dots.

6) The Ghosts move faster than Pac-man but slow down in corners and through tunnels (Pac-man doesn’t though)

7) The red ghost speeds up after eating a number of pac-dots but this number gets lower in higher levels

In the original Pac-man, the red ghost called ‘red guy’ has a personality of a chaser, the pink ghost called ‘pink guy’ has the personality of an ambusher, the cyan ghost named ‘blue guy’ is meant to be fickle and the orange ghost called ‘slow guy’ is stupid.

9) The American Pac-Man names the red ghost ‘Blinky’ with a character personality called ‘Shadow’, the pink ghost is conveniently called ‘Pinky’ with a personality called ‘Speedy’, the cyan ghost is titled ‘Inky’ with a  personality of ‘Bashful’ and the orange ghost is oddly called ‘Clyde’ with a personality of ‘Pokey’.

10) The maximum level you can reach up to is the 256th level and that is because once you reach it, a bug in the software makes the right side of the screen become a mess of numbers and letters which resulted in the 256th level being named ‘The Final Level’, ‘The Blind – Side’ or more common the ‘Kill Screen’. This level is impossible to play as the mess on the right side prevents the player from knowing the maze. The game loops back to the first level.

11) On July 3rd, 1999, Billy Mitchell achieved a perfect score in Pac-man of 3,333,360 in 6 hours and it was achieved only when Billy had to eat every bonus prize (the fruits) and all of the ghosts that turned blue when a power-pellet was eaten in all 256 levels. Billy didn’t lose a single life in his feat, thus creating the perfect Pac-man game.

12) In December, 1982, an 8 year old, Jeffrey R. Yee supposedly received a letter from President Reagan, congratulating him on his world record of 6,131,940, only achievable if he passed the Split-Screen level.

13) In 1999, Billy Mitchell offered $100,000 to anyone who could pass the Split Screen level before the 1st of January 2000. No one did it and the prize was unclaimed.

14) Pac-man was originally called ‘Pakku-man’ in Japan, inspired by a Japanese phrase that is onomatopoeic called ‘paku-paku taberu’. The ‘paku-paku’ is derived from the sound created by the mouth when it is opened and closed continuously.

15) Pac-man holds a Guinness world record for the ‘Largest Pac-Man Game’. This happened in 2004 where students from New York University made up Pac-Manhattan, enacting the game with individuals dressed as Pac-man and the ghosts, chasing each other round Manhattan’s city blocks. Each player was paired up with a controller in a control room who would communicate player positions using mobile phones.

A video (of not the best quality) showing Pac-Manhattan can be seen in the link given below.

http://current.com/items/76463982_pacmanhattan.htm

So those were just a few things you probably didn’t know about Pac-Man. Who knew Pac-Man was so interesting!