That’s why it took nearly 20 years for anyone to complete a perfect game of “Pac-Man” – finishing with no lives lost and the maximum number of points from each level. However, that doesn’t mean that Pac-Man is an easy game: It is, in fact, fiendishly difficult in a way that only classic arcade games designed to gobble up quarters can be. Unusually, the game doesn’t require players to press any buttons at all (except to start a one-player or two-player game), and the control system instead uses a single joystick. The appeal of “Pac-Man” lies, perhaps, in its simplicity. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) plays 'Pac-Man' at an exhibition preview in 2013. “And all of a sudden, we found a mascot – the first character in video games that existed not just in the artwork, but in the game itself. “Here comes this game that’s brightly colored and centered around a character that really doesn’t have a gender,” he said. It was also one of the very first games in the “maze” genre.īut most importantly, it had a defined main character, which was unheard of at the time according to Chris Melissinos, a video game historian and curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2012 exhibition “The Art of Video Games.” It featured the first “power-up” – the big pill that made ghosts vulnerable – and the first cut scenes, the small animated sequences between one level and the next. “Pac-Man” pioneered a number of innovations in gameplay and game design. Although the titular character did somewhat resemble a hockey puck, the game’s American distributor, Midway, feared that kids would scrape off the marquee, changing the “P” to an “F.” After its name was changed, the game became an instant hit, with nearly 300,000 units sold worldwide from 1981 to 1987. When the game was imported into the US, however, the name “PuckMan” was deemed inappropriate. You know, without actually needing any quarters.Game designer named Toru Iwatani created 'Pac-Man' in 1980. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms.

We also added a littleĮaster egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds. Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun. PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time.

When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician.įor me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets and-of course-free games!

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