You put in a quarter. You hear this cheesy song. And suddenly you’re a starving yellow creature, caught in a mad dash to devour all the little white dots you can catch before the hordes of floating undead bring you down. And it’s not an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Well, not yet, anyway.
The classic video game Pac-Man turns 25 this month, which, in video game time, makes him about 6,000 years old. He was a simple man, from a simpler era. He didn’t shoot anybody, jack any cars or beat his opponents senseless. Pac-Man even married, had a kid, and became a superhero, which is more than the Doom guy ever did.
It’s hard to understand the addictive properties of Pac-Man if you’ve never tried it, assuming that’s possible. To the casual observer it looks like a childishly simple game where you beat a maze while avoiding, for some reason, ghosts. Then before you know it eight months have passed and you’re desperately fighting to get to the next level before you pass out from all the plasma you’ve been selling for quarters.
Also this month, Pac-Man entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the “most successful coin operated game” in history. It sold 293,822 units when it was being manufactured and has made over $100 million since its creation, of which I personally accounted for about half.
It wasn’t just a game, not to me and not to the other kids crowded around the tabletop version at Pizza Hut who memorized hundreds of levels of twists and turns. Even then I knew that Pac-Man tapped into a cultural gestalt and in so doing, changed the face of gaming forever. Also, I was killer good at it.
Pac-Man was more personal than the other games. For once you were playing a real character — albeit a round yellow one that appeared to be mostly jaw – instead of a space ship or a green wire-frame tank. It was just you against your foes, pac-mano a mano. Unlike some games’ wimpy button maneuvering, the physical effort of throwing your body back and forth against the machine while executing a lightning fast feint and reversal gave you the heady feel of a fighter pilot escaping enemy fire. And when you gobbled a Power Pill and turned on your suddenly cowardly opponents, you truly knew what it was like to be invincible, or on steroids.
There was also the mysterious element of the supernatural. It was never mentioned how screen specters Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde perished or why they endlessly tormented Pac-Man, although personally I suspected they were themselves ancestral Pac-Men, condemned through eternity to protect the very dots that they died trying to acquire.
It encouraged healthy diets. How many video games reward you for eating fruit?
Not only did his wife become a feminist icon by scandalously avoiding the patriarchal term “Mrs.,” Ms. Pac-Man was more challenging, more fun, and sexier than her husband (she had a beauty mark, that mesmerizing wanton).
Pac-Man didn’t just sit on his dots, though. He had his own cartoon and cereal and clothing line and even became a recording artist. “Pac-Man Fever” is still available on CD from www.bucknergarcia.com and includes such breakaway pop hits as “Froggy’s Lament” and “Do the Donkey Kong” along with a new “Unplugged” version of the title song, which seems kind of pointless for a video game but there you go.
And he’s a restaurant mogul. Head to XS Orlando on International Drive and you’ll find the Pac-Man Cafe, 40,000 square feet and three floors of dining and games and even a Pac-Man Museum. Does Mario or the guy from Halo have one of those? I don’t think so.
There are live-action Pac-Man games involving running people in ghost costumes using cell-phones and city street grids. There are knock-off versions made for PDAs. Soon we’ll see new Pac-Man games, in 3D and anniversary editions. I’m expecting a Broadway version any day now.
His legend lives on. Let the lesser games fire their own weight in ammo, Pac-Man is a game of skill and cool-headedness that has yet to be matched.
Wak on, my friend. Wak on.