Don't mind my ego, but people have been paying countless quarters in to it for 27 years. I am the biggest and hungriest character in arcade history. I'm Pac-Man
Anatomy of a " Pac-Man "
Pac-Man was developed primarily by Namco employee Toru Iwatani. After receiving inspiration from a pizza with one slice missing, game designer Iwatani spent the next seventeen months creating a game that revolved around eating!
Iwatani's original name for his creation was Puck-Man . Upon release of Puck-Man in the US, Namco feared vandels could easly change the P to an F, becuase of this the name was changed and the game would for ever be know as Pac-Man !
Pac-Man is the best-selling coin-operated game in history. Forget Street Fighter 2 and Tetris. In the game's debut year alone, over 100,000 Pac-Man machines were made and sold around the world.
Namco estimates that the original Pac-Man arcade title has been played more than ten billion times in its 26-year history! Namco 's total Pac-Man revenues have reached $100 million... one quarter at a time.
The unique and original game play quickly inspired other game manufacturers to look into diffrent avenues of game design that differed from endless "alien invader battle" games. Pac-Man introduced an element of humor into video games that designers sought to imitate, as it appealed to a wider demographic than the teenage boys who flocked to the action-oriented games. Many popular video games of the 1980s, including Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Frogger, and Mario Brothers owe their existence to the success of Pac-Man .
Pac-Man World Champion: - Billy Mitchell
It took almost twenty years, but on July 3, 1999 for the first time ever, a perfect score of 3,333,360 was achieved on Pac-Man by Billy Mitchell at the Funspot Family Fun Center, Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. To achieve this, Billy had to eat every single bonus prize and every possible blue ghost in all 256 levels of the game - a feat which took him over six hours to complete. Not only that but he didn't lose a single life. It was the first ever perfect game of Pac-Man .
On completing the game, Billy announced "I never have to play that darn game again". He had been playing for seventeen years. In a recent interview with videogames.com, Billy spoke about how he did it."I understand the behavior of the ghosts and am able to manipulate the ghosts into any corner of the board I choose. This allows me to clear the screen with no patterns. This was a more difficult method for the initial 18 screens. I chose to do it this way because I wanted to demonstrate the depths of my abilities. I wanted to raise the bar higher - to a level that no one else could match."
Billy Mitchell - The all time Pac-Man champion of the world!
Pac-Man : 1980
Ms. Pac-Man : 1981
Pac-Man Plus : 1982
Jr. Pac-Man : 1983
Baby Pac-Man : 1983
