Pacman is originally an arcade game that has gained much popularity over the years. In this article, I will be discussing the Pacman 30th anniversary and other things related to the game.
Keep reading till the end to find out more information on the same!
About Pacman Game
Pac-Man was originally named Puck Man in Japan. It is a maze-action game that was released after being developed by Namco in the year 1980. In the region of North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing, originally as a part of a license agreement with Namco America.
Pacman 30th Anniversary
This popular arcade game’s 30th anniversary was celebrated by Google recently. The platform of Google made a doodle version of the game in honor of the Pacman 30th anniversary. It is very well a game that is playable.
Rules Of Playing The Game
The rules of the Pacman game are very simple in nature, just like with any other arcade game. Here is a list of some of the basic rules of the game:
- The hero Pacman gobbles up the points scattered around the room (dots), they eat up all of the Pac-dots.
- Placed in each corner of the room is a thing called the “Power Pellet” (slightly bigger dots). When the Pacman gobbles up one the ghosts that chase after you turn into yellow or blue. This way the Pacman can collect extra points by eating up the ghosts. The first ghost that you eat is going to give you two hundred points. For each additional ghost that you eat, you are going to get double the number of points.
- After the player gets ten thousand points they are going to get an additional life – but keep in mind that you are only going to get this once in the game.
Little Known Facts About Pacman
Here are a few unknown facts about the game Pacman:
Pac-Man Also Got Released As A Card Game
There’s an official card game that was launched in the year 1982 by Milton Bradley. The game is of course not as popular as the original game version of it.
The Maximum High Score Was Made After 20 Years
The designers of the game Pacman knew nothing about the problem regarding split-screen until the first person reached the last maximum possible level one day in the year 1999. The person who scored the highest level made a score of 3,333,360. His name is Billy Mitchell, and he discovered it. It took him a maximum time of six hours to finish the game.
Tip: If you have missed out on the information that I provided about Pacman’s 30th Anniversary, then you can certainly go back and give it a read.
The Ghosts Have Unique Personalities
By personalities, here it doesn’t mean literal personality characteristics, but each of the unique ghosts was designed with different movements so that the game wouldn’t become predictable and stay interesting till the end of time.
The red-colored ghost is named Blinky and is the one character that keeps following Pacman around for the whole game. The female ghost which is Pink in color anticipates where exactly Pacman might be heading and also tries to ambush the player (Pacman) at predictable spots.
The yellow/orange ghost chases Pacman most of the time but then also gives up often and heads back home. The cyan-colored ghost only pursues Pacman when the other three ghosts are somewhere nearby, then it sometimes jumps ahead of him.
You can play the game right on Google if you search for Pacman’s 30th anniversary!
There’s An Erotic Version Of Pacman
An unofficial game called Streaking was released by Shoei, the Japanese manufacturer. This was pretty controversial as well. The game was a very comical maze game. Here the player had to control a female streaker rather than the character of Pacman. The original chasing ghosts got replaced by policemen.
Pacman Got Voted As The Worst Game Ever
Despite gaining such massive success, there was this one version that was partially responsible for a video game crash in the year 1983. This highly anticipated game was originally a disaster and then start to flickering of the game characters made the game even more unplayable. It also going to be lacking in many features which were there in the game.
The Game Design Got Its Inspiration From A Pizza
The original designer of the game was Toru Iwatani. He was then researching themes of food and thought that they were appealing in nature to women. During their research, he noticed that there was a picture of a pizza with one of its slices cut out. This became the inspiration for the design of Pacman.
He also inspired the Japanese culture of “Kawaii”, which refers to cuteness.
The Game Got Designed Originally For Attracting Women
This was certainly not done sexually, let me tell you that. Back in the 80s arcade games mainly meant war and space shooting-themed games, hence Tori Iwatani thought of making a game for the younger females, with kawaii (cute) characters. This was done so without alienating the male-specific audience as well.
This arcade game is certainly a gender-specific game.
To Wrap It Up!
Overall, even though at first might have received criticism, it did gain much popularity over the years. That was all for information regarding the Pacman 30th anniversary. If you haven’t tried out the game before then you should go and give it a try.
Thank you for reading up till here. I hope you found the information useful.
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