In 1980 an obscure distributor by the name of Midway released a game fated to be one of the best arcade classics in history. Developed by Namco, Pacman is a maze game in which a player navigates Pac-man, a yellow figure, thru a maze eating tablets and avoiding ghosts.
Pacman has definitely had a serious result on the videogame industry. Till Pacman video games were just about exclusively “Space Shooters” games in which a player controls a space craft which has to shoot something. Pacman was the 1st game to break out of that model and be astonishingly successful.
The name Pacman springs from the Japanese phrase Pakupaku which loosely interprets into “he eats, he eats”.
In reality, the game was originally released using the name Puck Man in Japan, but when the game was picked up by Midway to be released in America the name was modified to Pacman for fear of vandalism that would probably be inflicted by north Americans in arcades and will include scratching the P into an F in the Japanese name “Puck Man”.
The 1st known “perfect Pacman game”, in which a player must complete all 255 levels, collect all the bonuses and never be caught by a ghost, was played by Billy Mitchell at 1999. Billy set the record at a local colonnade in New Hampshire while employing a technique of improvising across the six hours of game play and not using any repeating patterns or methods.