Video Game / Pac-Man

A well-known game developed by Namco (now Namco Bandai) from The Golden Age of Video Games, and one of the most popular games ever, Pac-Man was the first really successful Maze Game, and one of the first games to be popular with both sexes. It sparked a pop-culture phenomenon, and helped drive the early-1980s video game craze. Ironically, its poorly implemented Atari 2600 port helped turn Pac-Man Fever into Pac-Man Cancer. It also was the first video game to get an Animated Adaptation, with a reluctant Marty Ingels in the lead role.

The game depicts an abstract round yellow character vaguely reminiscent of a head with a mouth opening and closing to gobble up nearby objects. The player must steer the character around a maze and "eat" all of the dots and four special power pellets (originally "energizers"). Four ghosts (originally "monsters") pursue the character, and their touch is fatal unless Pac-Man recently ate a power pellet.

The original game famously had no random number generator: The ghosts moved through the maze in a completely predictable pattern. It is said that the ghosts were given different colors to enable the programmers to give each a different "personality" or movement pattern. Top players could develop and memorize specific patterns to clear levels without losing lives. However, the ghosts prove an equal challenge if run on a random AI.

A sequel, Ms. Pac-Man, was even more popular than the original, and featured more complex mazes and randomized play. It started life as a bootleg hack of the original Pac-Man called Crazy Otto, which featured the player character as a Pac-Man head with legs. GCC, who created that hack, thought this game could be successful and brought the game to Bally/Midway, Namco's American distributor. Midway was impressed; together with the hackers, they edited the sprites back into Pac-Man–style sprites, and with Namco's blessing, they released it as a Pac-Man sequel in America.

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were known for having lots of bootleg versions, many with altered mazes and graphics. They also had unofficial "speed-up kits" that, added to a legitimate machine, made the game faster and presumably harder.

The franchise continued through an endless array of sequels, including two Pinball machines (Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man Pinball and Baby Pac-Man) and lots of console adaptations. One of the most notable of these is Pac-Man Championship Edition, released for the Xbox Live Arcade and iPhone — notable because it is the only sequel to have been designed by Pac-Man's original creator, Tōru Iwatani. It is also a much faster, more intense game than the original Pac-Man, and was heralded as being "actually a video game now" by several gaming sites.

There's also a special version of the game, Pac-Man VS. for the Nintendo GameCube, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and bundled with the Game Boy Advance link cable (as well as several other Namco games, and it was even given away for free at stores!). One of the few multiplayer entries in the series, the game allows up to three players to take control of the ghosts on the TV screen, while a fourth player controls Pac-Man himself on a linked Game Boy Advance, passing systems and controllers among one another between rounds. It also features Mario as an announcer, for some reason, and makes a great party game.

Another notable sequel is Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This game was an adventure game, except instead of controlling Pac-Man, you were an off-screen helper who suggested things to Pac (who had a mind of his own and was prone to moods which affected how he would respond), either by directing him to look in a general direction or by shooting things with a slingshot. You could also give him power pellets, of which you had only three but could find more around the levels. This game also included a full version of the original Pac-Man, and either Ms. Pac-Man (SNES) or the exclusive Pac-Man Jr. (Genesis). Pac-Man 2 was largely forgotten but still has a cult following.

Fun fact: It is one of the few games from the Golden Age to still make money in arcades in some form. Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga and Pac-Man were released as a multiple game arcade machine in 2001, with Pac-Man being hidden or not depending on the version of the machine. There is also a "Penny Falls" gambling machine called Pac-Man Ball that's notable for featuring a screen with a video game mechanic reminiscent of Puzzle Bobble. It actually pays out rather generously, so play it if you find one.

Did you know the game was originally released in Japan as "Puck-Man"? It was changed for the North American release when marketing noticed how easy and tempting it would be to blot out a bit of the P to undesirably retitle the game. Either version of the name is based on the Japanese sound "paku-paku", for eating.

For the series' 30th anniversary, Google made a new version of the game using a custom map with their name on it. No, really, the map is their name. It's awesome to play, by the way (and the mechanics are scarily accurate to the arcade game, right down to the freaking Kill Screen). At the end of March 2015, the game became playable on Google Maps, so players could chomp pellets from all over the world.

This page should have anything you ever wanted to know about the gameplay.

See also Pac Man Fever.

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The franchise has contributed the following works:

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Game tropes include:

• 1 Million B.C.: The Prehistoric Age, set in Adventures in Time as one of the time zones Pac-Man has to travel through.
• Action Bomb: The Bomb power in 256 causes Pac-Man to turn red. If he comes into contact with a ghost or the power-up expires, Pac-Man detonates and kills all ghosts within a set radius around him.
• Adrenaline Time: In Championship Edition DX, it's something to help you so the time slows down when you're in a dangerous situation.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: The Glitch in Pac-Man 256.
• Aerith and Bob: The ghosts are mainly known as Blinky, Pinky, Inky and... Clyde. (Or Sue.)
• Alertness Blink: When sleeping ghosts are woken up in Championship Edition DX, they'll do this with the ! thing over their head and a chirp sound effect.
• Ancient Egypt: One of the time zones in Adventures in Time.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • The original Pac-Man - for the time, at least. Because the game doesn't have a random number generator, the ghosts' moves were deterministic, but they were each given different tendencies. In "Chase" mode, Blinky (Red) targets Pac-Man, Pinky (Pink) targets 4 spaces ahead of Pac-Man^note  unless Pac-Man is moving up, then it looks four spaces up and four spaces to the left, due to a bug, Clyde (Orange) targets Pac-Man when far away and the lower-left corner when close, and Inky (Light Blue)... wow. Draw a line from Blinky to two spaces in front of Pac-Man^note  or if Pac-Man is moving up, then two up and two left. Now keep drawing this line past this space until it's twice as long. The end of the line is where Inky targets. Detailed here.
  • When not in "Chase" mode, the ghosts go into "Scatter" mode, where they target squares off the grid instead (Blinky targets the upper-right corner, Pinky the upper-left, Inky the lower-right, and Clyde the lower-left, the same corner he targets when Pac-Man gets too close in Chase mode). The ghosts start off in Scatter mode, and then switch back and forth (staying longer in Chase than Scatter) until going permanently into Chase mode.
  • Ms. Pac-Man mixed things up by making the ghosts move pseudo-randomly when in Scatter mode instead of targeting the corners. The upside is that you can't memorize paths this time around, the downside is that finishing a level quickly (or "perfectly") now relies on luck.
• Animated Adaptation: Hanna-Barbera produced one in the early 1980s. And now there's a second one on Disney XD.
• Art Evolution: Pac-Man has changed a lot in design over the years; from this◊ to this◊ and now this◊. Recently, he and his friends got a complete design overall for Pac-Man Party, and Namco has plans to redesign him again.
• Ascended Glitch: Pac-Man 256 is based off the original game's Kill Screen.
• Bedsheet Ghost: Although the intermissions in the original game suggest they have some kind of body under there. The arcade game calls them "monsters".
• Big Eater: Guess who.
• Blow You Away: The Tornado and Twinado powers in 256 summon a tornado that chases and destroys ghosts. Twinado summons two tornadoes, not just one.
• Blue with Shock:
  • The monsters/ghosts, when an energizer/power pellet is eaten.
  • In Pac-Man Battle Royale, a player's Pac-Man becomes this if an opponent has eaten a Power Pill but the player hasn't.
  • In the first game, due to a bug, getting killed by a ghost under certain (very rare) circumstances (right as their vulnerability time wears off) causes all four ghosts to turn bright orange^note as in really bright, at least 50% more so than Clyde's usual colouring.

• Bold Inflation: Pac-Man is referred as PAC-MAN in modern game descriptions.
• The Bus Came Back: Sue, Funky, and Spunky, last seen from Pac-Attack and Pac-Mania respectively return for Pac-Man 256.
• Call Back: The grey ghosts in Pac-Man 256, which start off asleep but wake up and agressively chase after Pac-Man after he passes by them, mirror the behavior of the ghosts in Pac-Man Championship Edition DX.
  • The game also includes themes based off the original game, Championship Edition DX, and Pac-Mania.
• Cameo: Mario is the announcer in Pac-Man Vs.
• Cartoon Bomb: The Smart Bomb counter icons in Championship Edition DX certainly look like these.
• Catching Some Z's: Sleeping ghosts in Pac Man: Championship Edition DX and Spunky/Grey Common in Pac-Man 256.
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: Pac-Man Arrangement has this. Player 1 is the normal Pacman while Player 2 is a green one.
• Confusion Fu: Inky's behavior is somewhat unpredictable. It's based on the relative positions of both Pac-Man and Blinky, and there's a bug involved as well (normally "ahead of Pac-Man" means two tiles ahead in the direction he's moving, but when Pac-Man is moving up, the game thinks that ahead is two tiles up and two tiles left
• Cowardly Mooks: The ghosts once Pac-Man eats a power pellet.
• Cutscenes: Speaking of which, are therefore Older Than They Think.
• Difficult but Awesome: In 256, the Power Pellet is one of the most inefficient power ups in terms of ghost-killing, and can never be upgraded due to being a default power. However, due to its unique multiplicative scoring properties, you will always score higher with a Power Pellet than with other power ups if you eat multiple ghosts in one Pellet.
• Difficulty by Acceleration: Until the game eventually crashes.
• Distaff Counterpart: Ms. Pac-Man
• Dolled-Up Installment: Ms. Pac-Man, technically, sort of. Originally, the game was a Game Mod for Pac-Man titled Crazy Otto. Midway, which wanted a sequel to Pac-Man and couldn't wait for Namco to make one, bought the rights to Crazy Otto and changed it to Ms. Pac-Man.
• Dub Name Change: An interesting version, as not only were the original Japanese names for the ghosts (understandably) changed for the American market, but so were the descriptors cluing in the player to each ghost's particular movement style. They were:
  • Akabei/Blinky - Chaser/"Shadow"
  • Pinky - Ambusher/"Speedy"
  • Aosuke/Inky - Whimsical/"Bashful"
  • Guzuta/Clyde/Sue/Tim - Playing dumb/"Pokey"
  • This could potentially be considered a Dub-Induced Plot Hole, as the new descriptors for the latter three ghosts don't really match their movements. In fact, despite Pinky being called "Speedy" in the localized version, it's actually Blinky who is the quickest of the ghosts, increasing his chase speed at various stages of progress through the maze.
  • A booklet published not long after the game was released, called How to Win at Pac-Man, took the name "Bashful" literally, based on the fact that Pac-Man can sometimes go through him without harm, and other alleged quirks such as their claim that he tends to run away from Pac-Man. In fact, the pass-through ability is a glitch in the game's collision detection and not unique to Inky, and the other "quirks" have been disputed.
• Dummied Out: The original Japanese arcade release had a DIP switch that would display an alternate set of names◊ for the ghosts, which should look familiar to fans of Pac-Man Arrangement. When it was localized, the switch wasn't disabled (presumably due to being an excessive technical effort for little benefit), but the alternate names were replaced with meaningless strings of one letter◊.
• Eating the Enemy: Pac-Man gains the ability to eat the ghosts after devouring a "power pellet".
• Edible Collectible: The Trope Maker for bonus fruits, though after the eighth board the fruits are replaced by non-food items, such as the Galaxian ship (or the Atari "fuji" symbol in the Atari 5200 and 8-bit computer version). Of course, Pac-Man's goal in each stage is to eat all the dots, and the energizers let him chomp on the ghosts for more bonus points.
• Endless Game: As planned, but there's a Kill Screen after 255 mazes. However, every maze past 20 is exactly the same.
• Every 10,000 Points: Despite the trope name, only the first 10,000 points nets an extra life.
• Extreme Omnivore: Besides pellets, power pellets and ghosts, Pac-Man can eat fruit, Galaxian flagships, bells, keys, and much more. The port for Atari 8-Bit Computers substitutes an Atari logo for the Galaxian ship.
• Fan Remake: These do exist, whenever they be in small or large numbers. Champ Pac-Em is one of the earliest known.
• Forced Tutorial: Championship Edition 2 requires you to play the first half of the tutorial before you can play any other modes.
• Freemium: 256 follows the Crossy Road model, allowing you to purchase additional Themes for $0.99 apiece if you don't want to save the coins to buy them. Unlike the former game, Themes costs 2046 coins, making them significantly more time-consuming to grind coins for. Watching the ads and completing missions helps in this regard.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: The Laser and Optic powers in 256 cause Pac-Man to emit a continuous beam in front of him that destroys ghosts on contact. Optics takes it a step further and causes the beam to turn corners.
• The Future: Set in Adventures in Time, the last stage of Quest Mode.
• Game Mod: Besides Ms. Pac-Man, there was Hangly-Man, Pirahna, and quite a few others that popped up in the arcades.
  • The Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man got a mod in the form of Pac-Man Arcade, in effect being the reverse of how arcade Ms. Pac-Man came into being.
  • The Atari 7800 version of Ms. Pac-Man got modded into Pac-Man Collection, which features Pac-Man and some other game mods.
• Gameplay Grading:
  • In Championship Edition DX, many stages give you ranks based on your leaderboard percentiles.
  • Championship Edition 2 eschews percentile-based grading in favor of fixed point-based thresholds.
• Gender Flip: Pinky, who became female as of Pac-Man World and has remained so ever since.
• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: Rather radical example. In the cabinet art, Pac Man is drawn with legs and eyes. In-game, he's very stylized so only a pie chart remains. This image soon stuck with the audience.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: In Championship Edition 2, ghosts can be safely bumped into at first, but hit a train too many times in a short period of time and its leader will get angry, gaining the power to actually kill Pac-Man. On Extreme difficulty, however, hitting a train angers its leader immediately.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Pac-Man's hitbox is usually smaller than it looks, allowing him to dodge the ghosts more easily. In rare cases, Pac-Man can even pass right through a ghost (if he and the ghost "switch tiles" at the same time).
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: What happens to the ghosts when Pac-Man eats a power pill.
• Indy Escape: In Adventures in Time, Pac-Man ends up escaping a whole bunch. One instance is from a giant boulder.
• Invincibility Power-Up: Power pellets.
• Kill It with Fire: The Fire and Pyro powers in 256 cause Pac-Man to leave behind a flaming trail that kills ghosts on contact. Pyro additionally spreads to adjacent paths and gets those ghosts too.
• Kill Screen: ...not completely endless. It makes an in-game appearance as the Advancing Wall of Doom in Pac-Man 256.
• Lead the Target: Pinky doesn't target Pac-Man's actual position, but rather four spaces in front of him.
• Marathon Level: World's Biggest Pac-Man, which strings thousands of different user-generated mazes into one gi-freaking-gantic mega-maze. Good luck completing it in your lifetime.
• The Middle Ages: One of the time zones in Advetures in Time. Expect it to be somewhere in the middle of the game.
• Me's a Crowd: The Pac-Men power in 256 summons miniature Pac-Mans that chase ghosts and destroy them, much like the Tornado.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Along with Ms. Pac-Man, starting with the 19th level, where eating a power pellet does nothing to faze the ghost monsters. The monsters will reverse direction, but Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man must avoid their pursuers at all costs.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Jr. Pac-Man, with double-width scrolling mazes, bonus items that will mutate dots into larger dots that slow you down (and will even destroy power pellets if Jr. doesn't eat them), long corridors...
  • Baby Pac-Man, with more aggressive ghosts, laser-guided AI, and no power pellets to start off with... until you (hopefully) gain some in the pinball portion of the game.
  • Adventures in Time, eventually into some of the later mazes and difficulty levels. The ghosts might end up just as fast as Pac-Man on some levels, and the jump meter refills more slowly on harder settings.
• No Ending: Most Pac-Man arcade games go on until the Kill Screen. Pac-Mania can be ended by using DIP switches and Pac-Man Arrangement has a final boss after World 5.
• No Plot? No Problem!: The original game really had none: You send this little yellow guy around the maze to eat all the dots while avoiding the monsters, and you could eat the monsters if you ate a power pellet. Then again, there were those cut-scenes. Still, popular to the point of addictive.
• Non-Indicative Name: As said above, Pac-Man is known as "Puck-Man", but nonetheless is almost always depicted with a spherical body.
• Nonlinear Sequel: There are three sequels to Pac-Man: the official Super Pac-Man, the unofficial bootleg turned canon Ms. Pac-Man, or the 16-bit point and click action game Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures.
• Nostalgia Level: The original maze pops up in almost every game in the series in some form.
• Odd Name Out: For the orange ghost. Names of the ghosts were: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and... Clyde.
  • The orange ghost's name varies depending on the protagonist — in Ms. Pac-Man, it's "Sue", and in Jr. Pac-Man, it's "Tim".
  • The original Japanese names of the ghosts were always "Akabei" (from "Akai", Japanese for "Red"), Pinky (the only one who never went through a Dub Name Change), "Aosuke" (from "Aoi", Japanese for "Blue"), and Guzuta (from "guzuguzu", an onomatopoeia for sluggishness, and referencing the fact that he's always the last one to leave the ghost pen at the start of each level). Even here, Guzuta is still the Odd Name Out due to breaking the Colorful Theme Naming of the three others.
• Older Than the NES: Pac-Man was born in 1980, a year before Mario even existed. He's one of the oldest video game mascots in the videogame industry, and still going.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: One of the most famous.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Or possibly not ghosts at all.
• Pie-Eyed: When shown with arms, legs and a face, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have eyes like these. Appropriate since their pupils are shaped like they are.
• Pinball Spinoff: Two of them.
  • First was Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man Pinball. It was a more conventional Pinball game, with a five-by-five bank of lights in the playfield. During the game, the player could move Pac-Man (represented by a yellow light) by tapping flipper buttons for direction/movement to avoid the ghost (represented by a red light).
  • Five months later came Baby Pac-Man, which combined a Pac-Man video game with a pinball table, in a video-game-sized cabinet. Unfortunately, the small playfield was a challenge for most players, and the maze game was Nintendo Hard to the point where finishing the first maze was an accomplishment.
  • Pac-Man Pinball Advance was released in 2005 for, you guessed it, Game Boy Advance. It received unenthusiastic reviews.
• Power-Up Food
• Power Up Motif
• Retcon: Namco hasn't made very many mentions of Ms. Pac-Man since the 30th anniversary of the original arcade game. It hasn't been in any Namco Museums since Virtual Arcade, and the recently-announced Pac-Man Museum, a compilation based on Pac-Man, does not include Ms. Pac-Man.
  • It probably doesn't help that Ms. Pac-Man was developed by Midway rather than Namco. Then again, Namco did buy the full rights to the game and character.
  • There is also strong evidence that Pac-Man's other family members (Pac-Jr, Baby Pac, Professor Pac) were retconned out of the series after Pac-Man World 3.
  • Unrelated to the last three: Blinky and Clyde had their names switched for the Pac-Man World series.
  • It should be noted that Ms. Pac-Man is available in Pac-Man Museum as Downloadable Content and Ms. Pac-Man herself cameos in Super Smash Bros for Wii U (which Namco co-created alongside Hal Labs and Sora Ltd.).
• Rule of Funny: Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures lives on this.
• Scoring Points
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: After the comparatively Championship Edition DX, Championship Edition 2 brings the difficulty back up. The slowdown mechanic has been removed, bombs no longer force ghosts back into their spawn box (instead, they just bring Pac-Man back to his spawn point), ghost trains will continue to move at their usual speed while a power pill is in effect, and eating a ghost train requires eating its leader first or else Pac-Man will just bounce off. On top of that, the whole game, especially on Extreme difficulty, is a lot faster than even DX at speed 50.
• Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness: A primary difference between Championship Edition and Championship Edition DX. In CE, there is more focus on the player plotting their own path throgh the dots and trying to bait ghosts into an optimal path for chain-eating them. In CE DX, stages often have linear paths of dots and sleeping ghosts, putting more emphasis on following an intended line over figuring out one's path for themselves.
• Smart Bomb: You can use these in Championship Edition DX at the cost of an opportunity to score higher, forcing all of the ghosts back into the spawn box. In Championship Edition 2, bombs simply jump Pac-Man back to the Respawn Point.
• Something Person: Pac-Man, natch.
• Sturgeon's Law: In full effect with World's Biggest Pac-Man; for every genuinely good maze you come across, there are 20 that either go above and beyond Fake Difficulty or are just someone's name spelled out in walls and/or dots.
• Super Empowering: In Pac-Man Arrangement from Namco Classics Collection Volume 2, a fifth ghost named Kinky who could fuse with one of the four other ghosts to give them special powers fitting their personalities: Blinky gains a dashing headbutt, Pinky gains the ability to jump to and from any location in the maze, Inky gains a Doppelgänger Attack and Clyde gains the ability to lay down Pac dots in empty portions of the maze (forcing you to revisit those sections). Initially, the ghost house will only spawn one Kinky, but later levels will have it spawn more copies, allowing multiple ghosts to get special powers.
  • The official Namco sequel to the original Pac-Man was "Super Pac-Man".^note "Ms Pac-Man", although (at the time) endorsed by Namco, was created by Bally/Midway; making it more "Pac-Man 1½" than "Pac-Man 2".
• Support Party Member: Kinky in Pac-Man Arrangement from Namco Classics Collection Volume 2. He's the only ghost that cannot harm Pac-Man directly at all, as he's always vulnerable. However, he acts as support by powering up the other Ghosts to give them much more dangerous abilities.
• Timed Mission: The Championship Edition games.
• Timed Power-Up: The Power Pellet. In 256, this includes all of the other powers.
• Title Confusion: To clarify, the arcade game is Junior Pac-Man; the unlockable game in the Genesis version of Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures is Pac-Man, Jr. They are not the same game.
• Turns Red:
  • Well... Blinky is already red to begin with, but when a certain number of dots remain (20 in the first level, up to 120 in later levels), he moves faster and becomes even more of a Determinator. And once you've eaten half that number of dots, he'll speed up even more. Fans have dubbed this behaviour "Cruise Elroy".
  • In Pac-Mania, the player is given a visual indication when Blinky goes "Cruise Elroy" — he gains angry eyes. Later, Namco Classics Collection Volume 2's version of Pac-Man Arrangement kept this for Blinky (unless he is in his fused form), as well as raising his arms◊.
    • To add to this, as a timeout mechanic in Arragement, all of the ghosts would become angry and gain Blinky's AI.^note This only lasts until you die, though.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Pac-Man 2: the New Adventures gives you many ways to abuse the main character and others.
• Video Game Remake: Pac-Man Arrangement in Namco Classics Collection Volume 2 featured two-player co-op play, new power-ups, new stage elements such as dash arrows and jump panels, and a fifth ghost that could give the four other ghosts special powers. It is available in Pac-Man Collection for the Game Boy Advance.
• Video Game Setting: The worlds in Arrangement follow as this.
  • Toy Time: World 0/Toy Box World.
  • Nostalgia Level: World 1/Original Pac-Man World.
  • Under the Sea: World 2/Water World.
  • The Lost Woods: World 3/Green World.
  • Temple of Doom: World 4/Ancient Ruins World.
  • Eternal Engine: World 5/Ghost's Secret Base.
• Villain Teleportation: Glitchy, a ghost exclusive to 256, tends to teleport around the map every several seconds.
• The Wild West: One of the time zones in Adventures in Time.
• X Meets Y: Pac-Man 256 is essentially Pac-Man meets Crossy Road.^note Fitting, as they were developed by the same studio.

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