A Japanese student, Toru Iwatani, created Pac-Man. Iwatani wanted to make a game that appealed to many. His inspiration came from his pizza box that was missing slices.🍕 He was orininally called Puck Man. That name was thrown out because there was a good chance that his name could be vandalized by mischievous arcade patrons.
After a one-year development period, Midway released upright arcade machines and cocktail table arcade machines. The machines went to many arcades and bars and filled the hours of many individuals. There were guides dedicated to specific strategies and patterns that the user could employ in their playtime. Many places in the world had Pac-Man Fever like the Bunker and Garcia song.
Pac-Man fever brought many home ports to popular consoles during the 1980s. Pac-Man was put on on the Atari-2600, which was rushed to shelves and was a flickering migraine in a cartridge. Pac-Man was also put on the Atari 5200, Intellivision, Vic-20, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Apple, TI-99, PC, and Nintendo Entertainment System.
On a now-forgotten console, the Phillips Magnavox Oddessy 2 (1979-1984), a Pac-Man-like game, hit shelves, K.C. Munchkin in 1981. Despite creating and rushing a flickering mess, Atari was the only company licensed to make-at-home versions of Pac-Man. Despite being similar, K.C. Munchkin was not a Pac-Man clone. The Munchkin is teal instead of yellow, and the maze is always altering its shape. Atari took Phillips to court in 1982. The courts ruled in favor of Atari and stated that the changes "only tend to emphasize the extent to which it deliberately copied the Plaintiff's work." The K.C. Munchkin ruling was one of the first cases of how copyright law would impact computer software. K.C. Munchkin was taken off the shelves. Philips felt a tad bit snarky and created a sequel called K.C.'s Krazy Chase. The Munchkin moves through mazes getting power-ups to devour the Dratapiller, who looks very similar to the centipede from Atari's Centipede.
In 1982 a sequel, Ms. Pac-Man, was published by Midway. The game is a little different than the original. The ghosts behave a little differently, the fruit bonus bounces around the maze, there are more warp tunnels, and there are four different mazes.
The story in Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man's intermissions set up subsequent sequels as a stork brought them a baby. The story arc even made a Saturday morning cartoon possible. The many different sequels have encompassed many gameplay styles, from puzzles to side-scrolling platformers to point-and-click adventures. There have been many releases of Pac-Man in the past 40 years on every generation of home console.
