Pac-Man
Pac-Man was released in 1980 While Space Invaders reinvigorated the arcade market, it was a 1980 game from Namco that elevated the video game firmly into American popular culture. Namco hired Toru Iwatani, a pinball enthusiast, in 1977 to design games. Iwatani was somewhat put off by the shoot 'em ups dominating the market after Space Invaders and wanted to create a non-violent game that would appeal to both sexes. Deciding to base the game around taberu, the Japanese word meaning "to eat," Iwatani came up with a maze game in which the player had to collect all 240 dots in the maze while avoiding a group of enemy ghosts. In perhaps the first instance of a video game power-up, the player could eat one of four "power pills" in the maze to briefly gain the ability to eat the ghosts, which then leave the maze for a brief period. The shape of the protagonist came to Iwatani in a pizzeria when he removed the first slice from a pizza and was struck by the resulting circle with a missing slice that looked like a mouth. Both protagonist and game were named Puck-Man in reference to the shape, but for the U.S. release, Namco was afraid vandals might change the "P" to an "F" and gave the game the title it is more widely recognized by today, Pac-Man. An immediate hit in the United States, Pac-Man became the best-selling arcade game in that country to date with over 100,000 units sold, and created a new craze for maze games that partially displaced the shoot 'em up games. This also resulted in video games moving out of the arcades to locations such as convenience stores, drug stores, hotels, and airports, and resulted in Pac-Man himself becoming the first identifiable video game character and mascot, appearing on the cover of Time, being featured in the hit song Pac-Man Fever, and appearing in a number of products from bed sheets, dolls, penny banks, and stickers, to a Saturday morning cartoon. In 1981, MIT students Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran started a business called General Computer to produce enhancement kits for existing arcade games and ended up working with Midway, Pac-Man's American distributor, to create a sequel by applying such a kit to the Pac-Man board to create Ms. Pac-Man, which improved on the original by having four mazes instead of one, faster game play, and random enemy movement rather than fixed patterns and became the best-selling arcade game of all time in the United States with 115,000 units sold. Namco was also responsible for the 1982 racing game, Pole Position, considered the first great racing game by providing the most realistic racing action yet seen in the arcade as well as being one of the earliest to feature full color graphics and helping to pioneer the "rear-view racer" format that became standard in the genre.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia