#Pac man cereal how to#

Pac-Man debuted in the aftermath of tragedy in 2003.Īnd, of course, the original game has appeared on virtually every gaming platform to have ever been released. And even Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto helped make a Pac-Man game, Pac-Man Vs. There were a pair of Pac-Man pinball machines. Pac-Man is the best known (and, ironically, is considered a better game than the original), but there have been plenty of others, including Pac-Man Plus, Jr. He’s been in an Adam Sandler film as well as at least two television cartoons. He was the inspiration for a Top 40 hit (Buckner & Garcia’s “ Pac Man Fever” hit number nine on Billboard’s charts in 1982).

He has had his own line of trading cards, graced lunch boxes and board games, and been on the cover of Time Magazine. While he got his start in the arcades in the 1980s, Pac-Man has expanded his resume to include pretty much every other medium. “When the ghost comes, the ghost would be pinched by the shelter which would disfigure the ghost.” Pac-Man is the video game industry’s biggest multimedia star “I wanted to have a shelter and it would move up and down,” he says. But Iwatani says there was one gameplay mechanic he wanted that he had to leave out. That worked in Pac-Man’s favor, as it kept the game basic enough that it was instantly accessible to new players. The 1980s were an era of explosive creativity in the video game industry, but the technology was not especially advanced. So, technically, Pac-Man means “Munch Man.” There’s one feature Iwatani never got to implement The name Puck came from the Japanese expression “puck puck” which loosely translates to “munch munch.” Midway Games, which distributed the title in the U.S., changed it to Pac-Man so vandals wouldn’t cut out part of the P to create something that didn’t fit in a family-friendly arcade.

The original name for Pac-Man in Japan was Puck-Man. That verb - eat - began the thought process that led to the game.

#Pac man cereal how to#

As he thought about how to design a game that would attract female players, he thought about how much his wife loved to eat dessert. And Iwatani says food was central to the design of the character. Pac-Man’s raison d’être is chomping dots. Multiplying those figures by the total number of machines that were manufactured, the organization believes the arcade game was played more than 10 billion times in the 20th century. In the late 1990s, though, Twin Galaxies, an organization that tracks video game records, visited several used game auctions and counted how many times the average Pac Man machine had been played. The billions of dollars the game raised during its arcade heyday are impossible to definitively calculate. In fact, he ordered Iwatani to make them all red, thinking players might believe them to be Pac-Man’s allies. While the iconic bright colors of each ghost are part of the Pac-Man legacy today, Namco president Masaya Nakamura was not a fan of that design decision. So, we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.” There was pressure to make the ghosts indistinguishable “People had to go to the arcade center to play games. “The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers,” he says. Creator Toru Iwatani, in a panel presentation at GDC 2011, said he wanted to create a game to change that. When Pac-Man made his debut on May 22, 1980, video games were largely considered a boy’s club. Pac-Man was designed as a social equalizer Here are seven things you might not have known about Pac-Man.

And there is no gaming icon who is more recognizable - or who has done more to bring gaming to the front of the collective cultural mind.īut even the most well-known icons have their secrets. The yellow dude with the insatiable appetite for power pellets is turning 40, having racked up everything from sales records to a breakfast cereal. Sure, Pong and Space Invaders were already huge, but when Pac-Man hit the scene, it was something completely different.

Pac-Man debuted in the aftermath of tragedy.

Pac-Man is the video game industry’s biggest multimedia star.

There’s one feature Iwatani never got to implement.

No one has a clue how much money the franchise has made.

There was pressure to make the ghosts indistinguishable.

Pac-Man was designed as a social equalizer.