October 14, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Pac-Man

[Forty years agothis weekend, Nintendo released itsfirst game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly.So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changedthings, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

On three of themany ways Namco’s smash 1980 launch helped changedthe game(s).

1)     Character: Arcade and video games had certainlydiversified in the decade or so since the release of yesterday’s subject Pong, with the biggest hits in the yearsbefore Pac Man arrived space shooterslike Space Invadersand Asteroids.But one thing that no game had quite featured until the little yellow dude wasa recognizable and marketablemain character, one who could become the mascot and (literal) face of thegame and franchise. That focus allowed the game to include another innovation: cutscenes in between levels,brief mini-movies featuring that main character in wacky adventures. It allowedfor hugely successful sequels like 1981’s Ms. Pac-Manthat would not have been possible without a distinct character at the heart ofthe franchise. And it paved the way for many of the most popular video gamesand franchises of all time: the Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby, theAngry Birds, and more.

2)     Artificial Intelligence: One of the game’s vitalcoding innovations was that the enemies—the four cute but deadly “ghosts” (Blinky,Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, natch) who pursue Pac-Man as he tries to eat all thosedelicious dots and fruits—were programmedwith artificial intelligence and could respond to the player’s moves. Idon’t imagine it was the most sophisticated such AI—ExMachina this wasn’t, that is—but nonetheless, even the idea that everytime you played Pac-Man, you couldhave an entirely different experience depending on your own choices and whateffects they had on the ghosts’ behaviors was a profoundly new element to videogaming. I talked in Monday’s post about the flexible and interactive qualitiesto video games; of course that was somewhat true even with the Pong’s of the world, but addingartificial intelligence in this way (and at any level of complexity) reallybegan to illustrate the possibilities for that kind of player-gameinteractivity.

3)     Winnability: That artificial intelligence andits promises of constantly evolving gameplay certainly contribute to a sense ofPac-Man as a particularly replayablearcade and video game, one that grossed over $1billion in quarters (!) in its first year of release. But another importantelement was Pac-Man’s seeming yetelusive sense of winnabililty; as Atari’sChris Crawford put it in an 1982 interview with Byte magazine, “An important trait of any game is the illusion ofwinnability ... The most successful game in this respect is Pac-Man, which appears winnable to mostplayers, yet is never quite winnable.” Indeed, Pac-Man was designedto have no final level, although apparently if a player beats 255consecutive levels, a bizarrely split-screen and supposedly unbeatable 256thfinal level does appear. Even that strange, glitch-like detail, however,would only add to that sense of potential yet also ephemeral winnability,making playing Pac-Man again andagain that much more appealing. Which, for nearly forty years now, is just whatgamers have done.

NextGameStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?