Chapter 1: Welcome to the Machine
"I
don't have any particular interest in [computers]. I'm interested
in creating images that communicate with people. A computer is not
the only medium that uses images; I could use the movies or
television or any other visual medium. It just so happens I use
the computer."-Toru Iwatani
It was 1977 when a
self-taught, capable young man named Toru Iwatani came to work for
Namco Limited, a Tokyo-based amusement manufacturer whose main
product lines at the time were projection-based amusement rides
and light gun shooting galleries.
He was just 22 years old with no
formal training in computers, visual arts, or graphic design, but
his creativity and aptitude for game design were obvious to the
Namco executives that met with Iwatani. They offered to hire
him-with assurances they would find a place for him in the
company-and he accepted.
Iwatani
eventually found his place designing titles for Namco's new video
games division. His limited computer skills necessitated his being
paired with a programmer who would write the actual code while
Iwatani took on the role of game designer for the project.
This
was a new job for the game industry in 1977 when most games were
designed by the programmers who coded them. In addition to a
programmer, Iwatani's team would usually include a hardware
engineer to develop the various devices and components, a graphic
artist to realize his visual ideas, and a music composer for any
music and sound effects needed in the game.
Iwatani
had initially wanted to work on pinball machines, but Namco had no
interest in the pinball business. Perhaps as a concession, his
first game design, called Gee Bee, was
a paddle game similar to Atari's Breakout
but with a decidedly
pinball-inspired slant to the gameplay.
Released in 1978, it was
Namco's first original video game-they had only ported
existing Atari games to the Japanese market up to this point-and
it enjoyed moderate success in the arcades.
But
the paddle games were losing ground fast to a new genre. The
unprecedented success of Taito's Space Invaders in
1978 caused an industry-wide shift toward space-themed,
shoot-'em-up games (as well as a national coin shortage in Japan).
Game manufacturers scrambled to match Taito's success with space
shooters of their own. Namco was quick to follow suit, assigning a
team to start work on a Space Invaders clone
at once. It was around this time that Toru Iwatani began thinking
about designing a different kind of game. He felt the shoot-'em-up
craze was destined to fade away like the paddle games before them.
Rather than make another space shooter, Toru wanted to take his
game design in a completely new direction that did not focus on
violence or conflict, and would appeal to both male and
female audiences.
He
took inspiration from a children's story about a creature that
protected children from monsters by eating them. One of Iwatani's
design methods included taking key words associated with a story
to aid in developing his ideas. The kanji word taberu
("to eat"),
became the premise for the game.
The word kuchi
("mouth") has a
square shape for its kanji symbol and provided the inspiration for
the game's main character-the better-known legend of Iwatani
receiving his inspiration from a pizza pie with a slice missing
was, by his own admission, not entirely correct:
"Well,
it's half true. In Japanese the character for mouth (kuchi) is a
square shape. It's not circular like the pizza, but I decided to
round it out. There was the temptation to make the Pac-Man shape
less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we
add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we
added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it.
Food is the other part of the
basic concept. In my initial design, I had put the player in the
midst of food all over the screen. As I thought about it, I
realized the player wouldn't know exactly what to do: the purpose
of the game would be obscure. So I created a maze and put the food
in it. Then whoever played the game would have some structure by
moving through the maze.
The Japanese have a slang word-paku
paku-they use to describe the motion of the mouth opening
and closing while one eats. The name Puck-Man came from that
word."
-Toru
Iwatani
The monsters from
the children's story were included as four ghosts that chase the
player through the maze, providing an element of tension. Attacks
on the player were designed to come in waves (similar to Space
Invaders) as opposed to an endless assault, and each ghost was
given an unique personality and character.
The children's story
also included the concept of kokoro ("spirit")
or a life force used by the creature that allowed him to eat the
monsters. Toru incorporated this aspect of the story as four
edible power pellets in the maze that turn the tables on the
ghosts, making them vulnerable to being eaten by the player.
With
a name and a basic design in place, Iwatani was ready to begin
work. The team Namco assigned Iwatani to bring Puck-Man to
life included a programmer (Shigeo Funaki), a hardware engineer, a
cabinet designer, and a music composer (Toshio Kai).
Development
got underway in early 1979. In the course of that year, two new
pinball-themed designs from Iwatani-Bomb Bee and
Cutie Q-were both released during Puck-Man's
development cycle. Both games were similar to Gee Bee but
with stronger gameplay and improved visuals.
The Namco team
working on the Space Invaders clone for the past several
months had just achieved a technological coup for Namco: the first
game to use a true, multi-colored, RGB display instead of the
monochrome monitors with colored cellophane tape so prevalent at
the time.
Thanks to the breakthrough of the other team, Iwatani
now had the new promise of color to enhance his design. Mindful
that he wanted the game to appeal to women, he immediately decided
to use it on the ghosts, choosing pastel shades for the bodies and
adding expressive, blue eyes. Dark blue was used for the maze
itself, while Puck-Man was drenched in a brilliant yellow.
The
look and feel of Puck-Man continued to evolve for over a
year. A large amount of time and effort was put into developing
the ghosts unique movement patterns through the maze and tweaking
the game difficulty variables as boards were cleared.
Bonus
symbols (including the Galaxian flagship) were added into
the mix at some point, and the ghosts were finally given names:
Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta. Sound effects and music were
some of the final touches added as development neared an end along
with constant tweaking of the ghosts' behavior.
Puck-Man's
creation was a year and five months in the making-the
longest ever for a video game to that point. Finally, on May 22nd,
1980, it was released to arcades in Japan. Initially, the game did
moderately well, but was no overnight sensation.
In fact, Namco's
multi-colored Space Invaders clone, called Galaxian,
was much more popular with the gaming public-the
predominately male, game-playing audience in Japan was unsure what
to make of Puck-Man with its cartoon-like characters, maze,
and pastel colors, whereas Galaxian was more immediately
familiar to them with its shoot-'em-up space theme.
Midway
was a distributor of coin-operated video games in the U.S. that
was always looking for the next big hit from Japan to license and
bring to America. They opted for both Puck-Man and
Galaxian, modifying
the cabinets and artwork to make them easier to manufacture as
well as providing a more American look and feel.
Puck-Man
went through the majority of the
changes: the cabinet was modified slightly, changing the color
from white to a bright yellow to make it stand out in the arcade.
The detailed, multi-colored cabinet artwork was replaced with
cheaper-to-produce, three-color artwork illustrating an iconic
representation of Puck-Man (now drawn with eyes and feet) and one
blue ghost.
English names were given to the ghosts (Blinky, Pinky,
Inky, and Clyde), and the Namco title was changed to Midway. The
most significant change to Puck-Man was
the name. Midway feared it would be too easy for nasty-minded
vandals to change the P in Puck-Man to
an F, creating an unsavory epithet.
Not wanting their product
associated with this word, Midway renamed the game Pac-Man
before releasing it to American
arcades in October 1980.
But
the situation in America was reversed from Japan for these two
titles. Galaxian got
lost in the shuffle of the shoot-'em-up craze that blanketed
America's arcades and, by the fall of 1980, it was already
competing with more advanced video games like Defender.
In the end, Galaxian enjoyed
moderate success in America and in Japan, but was never the smash
hit the original Space Invaders was.
Pac-Man was another
story. There were no games to compare it to-it was in a
genre all by itself. The bright yellow cabinet, visuals, and
sounds drew a great deal of attention. No one had seen a game
quite like this before.
The addictive gameplay and challenge of
increasing levels of difficulty kept the die-hard gamers more than
happy, while the simplicity of the game appealed to younger
children. The lack of war-like motifs and violence did as Iwatani
had hoped and attracted a sizable female audience-a first
for a video game. Even the parents wary of the violence-themed
arcade games had no problem with their kids playing as cute and
innocuous a game as Pac-Man.
Pac-Man
went on to capture the world's imagination like nothing before or
since. It was a genuine phenomenon on a global scale, selling over
100,000 machines in its first year alone. Easy to learn but
notoriously difficult to master, everyone from school children to
Wall Street executives dropped quarter after quarter into an
ever-increasing number of waiting
Pac-Man machines.
By 1982, Pac-Man merchandise was
literally everywhere: t-shirts, hats, keychains, wrist bands,
bedsheets, air fresheners, wall clocks, drinking glasses, trading
cards, stickers, cereal boxes, comic books-even a Saturday
morning cartoon.
A novelty song called "Pac-Man Fever"
received significant radio play, reaching number nine on the U.S.
Billboard charts. Many books were written offering tips and tricks
used by the best players to achieve high scores-the
first-ever strategy guides published for a video game.
Fast-forward to
nearly thirty years later: Pac-Man remains the best-selling
coin-operated video game in history. Still considered the most
widely-recognized video game character in the U.S., his likeness
has been licensed to over 250 companies for over 400 products.
His
namesake has been adopted by the business world to describe a way
to defend against a hostile takeover (the defending company
swallows up the larger company instead in a move known as the
"Pac-Man defense"). There is even an upright Pac-Man
machine on display at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Unlike the majority of
his early-80s contemporaries, new Pac-Man games
are still in development today. Most recently, Pac-Man
Championship Edition was
released in 2007 for the X-Box 360 console with the aid of Namco
game designer Toru Iwatani.
Interest
in the original coin-op title has never completely faded,
thankfully. Thanks to Namco's re-release of Pac-Man
and other arcade
classics for modern home consoles, new generations of Pac-addicts
have worn their hands out playing a game often older than
themselves.
Many classic titles are also kept alive thanks to the
advent of high-quality arcade emulators available for the home
computer (like MAME) that use a software copy of the arcade ROM
chips to recreate the game with 100% accuracy. Several web pages
with information about the original Pac-Man
arcade game can be
found online including Wikipedia
and the Killer
List Of Video Games.