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Pac-Man Was Puckman

Above, a "video tribute":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htl_vwkZWHw to Mr. Man. . It was thirty years ago on Saturday that Pac Man began gobbling up those little dots. When it was released on May 22, 1980 in Japan, it was "the first cute game...

Above, a

video tribute

to Mr. Man.

.
It was thirty years ago on Saturday that Pac Man began gobbling up those little dots. When it was quietly released at a movie theater in Tokyo on May 22, 1980, it was “the first cute game,” says creator Toru Iwatani, in an interview posted on Namco's PacMan.com, and was made with women in mind: "At the time when Pac-Man was released, the image of the game arcade was that it was a dark and scary place, and it's a place for only guys. However, we knew that there would be no future in arcades unless girls and couples would come in as well."

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One of the lynchpins of the so-called “golden age” of video games along with Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, Pac Man has since been replaced by all manner of shoot-em-ups, handheld games, psychedelic adventures and arty, no-frills gamers. Apparently you can still play the old Pac on your phone ($3.99 for a sale version of the iPhone game and $6.99 in the Android store), or today on the Google homepage. But somehow it still feels better to deposit those quarters.

Kill screens and perfect games
Apparently, the game is technically unwinnable. Because the game’s level counter was a single 8-bit byte, it could store only 256 distinct values (0–255). Reaching the 256th level causes a counter that is used while drawing the fruit to overflow to zero, which causes 256 fruits and seven blank spaces to be drawn. The result is one of gaming’s most famous kill screens.

Nevertheless, the bug can be patched. The first person to play a perfect game was Billy Mitchell in 1999, in the span of 6 hours. Mitchell has also taken on Donkey Kong, in a rivalry Motherboard chronicled in this documentary about Walter Day.

PUCKMAN?
In the interview Iwatani reveals his affection for yellow (it seems to do with pizza), and this naughty gem about Pac-Man’s name:

Iwatani: Here’s another story about PAC-MAN’s name. Originally, the spelling of PAC-MAN was “PUCKMAN” in Japan. However, it was not accepted for use in the US.

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Interviewer: Why?

Iwatani: If a part of the “P” is chipped off a little bit, it will be an “F.”

Interviewer: And people would chip it deliberately?

Iwatani: That’s right. “PAC” was suggested as an alternate while discussing this issue with the Americans. So the name then became “PAC-MAN.” The game was subsequently re-imported to Japan, and so even in Japan the title is written as “PAC-MAN”

The next logical question:

Interviewer: Is the game popular internationally among women?

Iwatani: Yes. Regardless of age or sex, this character is accepted by everyone. The game is easy to play as the control stick has only 4 directions. This game is widely popular as it’s known not only in North America but in Europe, Asia and even a small island in the center of the Pacific Ocean.

There you have it. Pac Man does it all. And all he does is eat dots.

Read the rest of the Pac Man interview at PacMan.com