What's yellow, looks like a pizza and goes wacka, wacka, wacka, wacka. PacMan of course. No classic video game site would be complete without a tribute to arguably the most successful arcade game in history. But why was this game such a hit and where did the idea come from, read on to find out.

The story goes something like this. Over dinner programmer Toru Iwatani searching for inspiration for a game character saw a pizza with a slice missing from it. Aha, a game character was born. The missing slice being the mouth (those crazy guys in Japan ugh!) the rest of the pizza was the body. Genius or mad you do the maths. Toru was fed up with all the shoot-em-ups in the arcades and wanted to create a game with mass appeal beyond the realms of the juvenile delinquent brigade. He wanted his game to appeal to children and women, yes women. The character was to be almost cartoon like with bright colours. PacMan was born, or nearly.

Originally the game was christened Puckman, hmmm, from the Japanese phrase pakupaku, which means to flap one's mouth open and close, if I remember correctly form my Japanese lessons at school. The game was a massive hit in Japan, almost instantly. Bally/Midway decided to bring the game to America. The deal with Namco was done, but one request was made, a name change. A game called Puckman, well come on, how long before that would get altered on cabinets across the land not to mention in everyday speak. So PacMan came into being.

The game was not complicated, but back in the 1980's it threw up some challenges for the designers. It took 15 months to create with 8 people working on it, but their perseverance was rewarded when within the first year over 100,000 machines were sold. PacMan ate up all the competition around it, excuse the pun. Today the game is the best selling video game in history. Wow, again wow!

Some judge a games greatness by the sequels it spawns so read on: 1981 - Ms. PacMan, 1982 - Super PacMan, 1982 - PacMan Plus, 1982 - Baby PacMan, 1983 - Professor PacMan, 1983 - Pac and Pal, 1984 - Pacland and not to mention the countless conversions on the Atari, Home Computers, handheld games and TV shows for kids, there was no stopping this guy.

Ms PacMan

PacMan was the first Super Hero Video Game character. The original Sonic The Hedgehog or Mario. Even the villains of the game had names and characters Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. The game play was simple. Eat the dots around the maze and not get caught by the ghosts (Blinky and pals) who's mission it was to patrol the neon blue maze and find PacMan before he could gobble up all the power pellets littered around it. One touch by these guys and it was curtains.

Bonus points came in the form of fruit which would appear without warning in the centre of the maze. This usually resulted in a mad dash for the fruit only for it to disappear at the last moment. In each corner of the screen sat a large dot which when eaten transforms Pac into a ghost eating maniac. All ghosts could be eaten, and the more you ate in a row the more their value went up. Only the eyes would be left to scurry on back to the cage in the middle of the screen.

The game started with funky intro music and had small animations between some levels. Each level got quicker, and the munching noises quickened all adding to the thrill and tension of the game play. The maze contained 240 dots which all had to be eaten to make it to the next level.

Tips and Tricks:
It is of course possible to follow a set pattern around each maze that enables you to clear the screen without being caught by any of the ghosts, but I am not going to tell you that because that would be too easy.

It is possible to sit on the screen and never even get seen. Head for the T shaped wall above you. Go to the right hand side of it without being spotted by any ghosts, stay there facing upwards and you will never be seen.

Little known facts about Pac.
PacMan travels 20% faster in the areas where the dots have already been eaten. You know, I always thought he did, but could never prove it.

The original American rights were to go to Atari, but they turned them down, claiming the game was too easy, another great decision by the one time King of Video Game companies. You may well be old enough to remember their later botched attempt to port the game to the Atari VCS, compounding their original blunder by producing possibly the worst ever home conversion of an arcade game.

Summary
After such a glowing review of the game and bearing in mind it is the biggest arcade hit of all time my next sentence might shock you. I could not stand PacMan. I rarely played it, rarely watched it being played and never rushed to get any kind of conversion of it. At the time of its release I was one of those sad shoot-em-up delinquents. I was being tempted by the fruits of others, namely Defender, Centipede and other blast fests. It just was too cute and sweet, and girls liked it for God's sake. But hundreds of thousands of others felt differently and the game is still popular today and rightly deserves the accolade of 'The Biggest Grossing Classic Video Game Of All Time'.

Overall Classic Game Rating - 8.5