Pac-Man

Pac-Man, also known as simply Pac, is an arcade video game that was made by Namco and designed by Toru Iwatani. It was released in 1980, and became very popular in the history of games. It is usually designated for kids between the ages of 2 - 12 years old.

In Pac-Man, the player makes a Pac-Man, who is a yellow data program, move around a maze in an intranet. The viruses are the ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. The goal is to eat every Pac-Dot while not getting caught by the ghosts. For extra points, fruits that appear can also be eaten. When Pac-Man eats a power pellet, he becomes a virus checker and the ghosts turn blue for a short period of time and can be eaten. The time that the ghosts are blue generally decreases from one stage to the next. Beginning at stage 19, the ghosts do not turn blue at all when a power pellet is eaten. Even though the game has 256 stages, the last level later had its problem with the creation of the game fixed.

The player begins the game with 3 lives, and lose one each time Pac-man collides with a ghost. The game ends when all lives are lost. Pac-man gets an extra life once the player gets 10,000 points.

The game is called Puck-Man, or Puck, in Japan. The game was renamed to Pac-Man in the United States so that nobody could change the "P" to "F". There were many sequels and remakes based on the game. Hanna-Barbera made a animated TV show airing on ABC in the early 1980s. The game was also part of Namco Museum games. There is a Namco Museum Remix for the Wii.

Pac-Man was one of the first games to have cutscenes. It has 3 cutscenes in total. Music for Pac-Man was made by Shigeichi Ishimura and Toshio Kai.

Playing Features

• 4 Ghosts To Run Away From, With Different Personalities!
• A Game-Breaking Glitch On Level 256! (formerly)
• Take Turns In Multiplayer!

Remakes and sequels

Pac-Man was followed by a series of sequels, remakes, and re-imaginings, and is one of the longest-running video game franchises in history. The first of these was Ms. Pac-Man, developed by the American-based General Computer Corporation and published by Midway in 1982. The character's gender was changed to female in response to Pac-Man's popularity with women, with new mazes, moving bonus items, and faster gameplay being implemented to increase its appeal. Ms. Pac-Man is one of the best-selling arcade games in North America, where Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man had become the most successful machines in the history of the amusement arcade industry. Legal concerns raised over who owned the game caused Ms. Pac-Man to become owned by Namco, who assisted in production of the game. Ms. Pac-Man inspired its own line of remakes, including Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness (2000), and Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze, and is included in many Namco and Pac-Man collections for consoles.

Namco's own follow-up to the original was Super Pac-Man, released in 1982. This was followed by the Japan-exclusive Pac & Pal in 1983. Midway produced many other Pac-Man sequels during the early 1980s, including Pac-Man Plus (1982), Jr. Pac-Man (1983), Baby Pac-Man (1983), and Professor Pac-Man (1984). Other games include the isometric Pac-Mania (1987), the side-scrollers Pac-Land (1984), Hello! Pac-Man (1994), and Pac-In-Time (1995), the 3D platformer Pac-Man World (1999), and the puzzle games Pac-Attack (1991) and Pac-Pix (2005). Iwatani designed Pac-Land and Pac-Mania, both of which remain his favorite games in the series. Pac-Man Championship Edition, published for the Xbox 360 in 2007, was Iwatani's final game before leaving the company. Its neon visuals and fast-paced gameplay was met with acclaim, leading to the creation of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (2010) and Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (2016).

Coleco's tabletop Mini-Arcade versions of the game yielded 1.5 million units sold in 1982. Nelsonic Industries produced a Pac-Man LCD wristwatch game with a simplified maze also in 1982.

Namco Networks sold a downloadable Windows PC version of Pac-Man in 2009 which also includes an enhanced mode which replaces all of the original sprites with the sprites from Pac-Man Championship Edition. Namco Networks made a downloadable bundle which includes its PC version of Pac-Man and its port of Dig Dug called Namco All-Stars: Pac-Man and Dig Dug. In 2010, Namco Bandai announced the release of the game on Windows Phone 7 as an Xbox Live game.

For the weekend of May 21–23, 2010, Google changed the logo on its homepage to a playable version of the game in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the game's release. The Google Doodle version of Pac-Man was estimated to have been played by more than 1 billion people worldwide in 2010, so Google later gave the game its own page.

In April 2011, Soap Creative published World's Biggest Pac-Man, working together with Microsoft and Namco-Bandai to celebrate Pac-Man's 30th anniversary. It is a multiplayer browser-based game with user-created, interlocking mazes.

For April Fools' Day in 2017, Google created a playable of the game on Google Maps where users were able to play the game using the map onscreen.

A Pac-Man-themed downloadable content package for Minecraft was released in 2020 in commemoration of the game's 40th anniversary. This pack introduced a ghost called 'Creepy', based on the Creeper.

Technology

The original arcade system board had one Z80A processor, running at 3.072 MHz, 16 kbyte of ROM and 3 kbyte of static RAM. Of those 1 kbyte each was for video RAM, color RAM and generic program RAM. There were two custom chips on the board: the 285 sync bus controller and the 284 video RAM addresser, but daughterboards made only from standard parts were also widely used instead. Video output was (analog) component video with composite sync. A further 8 kbyte of character ROM was used for characters, background tiles and sprites and an additional 1 kbit of static RAM was used to hold 4bpp sprite data for one scanline and was written to during the horizontal blanking period preceding each line. Sprite size was always 16x16 pixels, one of the four colors per pixel was for transparency (of the background).

The monitor was installed 90 degree rotated clockwise, the first visible scanline started in the top right corner and ends in the bottom right corner. The horizontal blanking period, which starts after the level indicator at the bottom is drawn, had a duration of 96 pixel clock ticks, enough time to fetch 4 bytes of sprite data per 16 clock ticks for 6 sprites. Although attribute memory exists for them, sprites 0 and 7 are unusable: Their pixel fetch timing windows are occupied by the bottom level indicator (which just precedes the hblank) for sprite 0 and two rows of characters at the top of the screen, which just follow the hblank, for sprite 7.

Pac-Man Media

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  Creator of Pac-Man, Toru Iwatani, at the 2011 Game Developers Conference

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  Portable version (Handheld electronic game) by Japanese company Tomy

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  Pac-Man characters as street decorations in Barcelona, Spain

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  Pac-Man interactive exposition at The Art of Video Games