Pac-Man

Pac-Man is a maze arcade game developed by Namco and released in Japan on May 22, 1980 under the name Puck Man. Midway Manufacturing sold it in North America from October 1980 under the new name. The usual explanation for the change is that executives feared vandals would turn the "P" on the cabinet into an "F".^[1] The player steers a yellow circle with a wedge-shaped mouth through a maze, eating every dot while four ghosts chase it. It was the highest-grossing arcade game in Japan in 1980, and more than 100,000 cabinets were sold in the United States within a year.^[1] A 2022 memo of Molecular Reality Corporation names it as one of five inspirations for the planned game Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant.

The maze holds 244 dots: 240 small ones and four large ones, called energizers or power pellets. A level ends when all are eaten. After an energizer the ghosts turn blue and flee for a few seconds, and Pac-Man can eat them for points. Fruit appears below the center of the maze twice in each level for bonus points. The two sides of the maze are joined by a tunnel through which Pac-Man and the ghosts wrap around.^[2]

Each ghost picks its target by a different rule. Blinky, the red ghost, goes to the tile that Pac-Man occupies. Pinky aims four tiles ahead of Pac-Man's direction of travel. Inky draws a line from Blinky through a point two tiles ahead of Pac-Man and doubles it. Clyde goes for Pac-Man when he is more than eight tiles away and heads for his corner of the maze when he is closer.^[2] Pinky and Inky share a programming error: when Pac-Man faces up, their targets also shift to the left. The ghosts alternate between chasing and retreating to their corners on a timer that shortens in later levels.

The game has no ending. A fault in the routine that draws the bonus symbols fills half the screen on level 256 with garbage characters and makes the level impossible to finish, because the level counter is stored in eight bits and overflows when it passes 255.^[2] A perfect game scores 3,333,360 points. Between levels the game plays short animated scenes that are often called the first cutscenes in a video game, though Space Invaders Part II (1979) had similar interludes.

Atari published a conversion for the Atari 2600 in 1982. Critics faulted it for flickering ghosts and a maze that looked unlike the original, and it sold millions of copies.^[1] A novelty song, "Pac-Man Fever", reached number 9 on the American singles chart.

In the memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest, Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant is "Inspired by: 2.5d-rogue-like, with 2d hints of Gauntlet, Ultima, and Pac-Man, and 3d hints of Bard's Tale and Dungeons of Daggaroth"[sic].^[3]

A second Pac-Man appears on the company's page MoleculArcade, which lists a title called Pac-Protein, marked "Coming Soon" in 2026. Its description reads "Navigate a hungry enzyme through a maze of substrates. Collect cofactors for power-ups and gobble up inhibitors before they deactivate you!"^[4] In biochemistry the outcome is often the reverse. An enzyme that binds a mechanism-based inhibitor can be permanently inactivated by it, and penicillin kills bacteria this way, by binding the enzymes that build their cell walls.

• Gauntlet
• Space Invaders
• Moleculoids