50 Years of Video Games: Pac-Man (Arcade)

Video games had been slowly finding their footing during the 1970s, but it was 1980 that would give the burgeoning medium a face. Rather than just being a game starring shapes moving on a screen, Namco’s Pac-Man introduced to the world to a character who was distinct, who originated in video games rather than being some borrowed face from another medium, and he represented the wonderful whimsy and world of fantasy that video games could offer. Despite his name Pac-Man was not a human but a circular yellow figure with the now iconic shape that resembles a pizza with a single slice removed. Easily recognizable as a mouth, especially as it flaps open and shut to gobble up the pellets in the maze he inhabits, Pac-Man’s elegant simplicity made him recognizable wherever he cropped up, and after the breakaway success of his arcade maze game debut, he would go on to get a hit song, a cartoon, and a spot as an important part of the 80s cultural identity in the U.S.A..

While looking a little strange on the arcade marquee by having legs and eyes when in-game he was featureless beyond his mouth, Pac-Man is the player character and one with a few more distinct traits to him. While traveling the black maze with its dark blue walls, Pac-Man’s gobbling of the dots emits a distinct sound. Often described with the onomatopoeia “wakka-wakka”, it’s a pleasant little noise that makes each little pellet consumed a little bit more satisfying and its measured volume means it doesn’t grow grating even though you’ll be hearing it a lot as you play. There are 244 dots in the maze when a round starts but Pac-Man moves around the maze fairly quickly, the player not actually controlling his speed but instead using the joystick when they want Pac-Man’s automatic forward movement to take turns. Clearing out the whole maze can be done pretty swiftly, a new round starting once the all 244 dots have been successfully munched.

However, navigating the maze is no easy feat once the ghosts start escaping the box in the middle of the maze. Four spirits will gradually enter the maze as well after play has begun, contact with them leading to an instant death for Pac-Man that also has a fairly distinct death sound and interesting visual flourish of Pac-Man opening his mouth wider until his body folds in on itself. The specters that patrol this maze are colorful cartoon ghosts similar in appearance to the bedsheet ghost archetype, a comparison that seems to extend further than expected based on the small scenes that emerge between rounds. If you can survive through enough rounds you’ll eventually see little animated segments where Pac-Man and a ghost chase each other, and while the first one just seems a fanciful take on the pursuit beyond the borders of the maze walls, two of the scenes involve a ghost either having its sheet damaged or completely removed, revealing a strange fleshy creature beneath. No future game seems to really go with the idea this is some disguised creature, but it certainly serves as a strange reward for managing to stick with the game for a few rounds.

These ghosts make the player have to plan their maze navigation and reacting to their behavior is key to ensuring you don’t get cornered and caught. The ghosts actually have some fairly detailed AI guiding how they choose to move about the maze and pursue the player, each one having a different approach so that you can’t get too complacent. The red ghost, known either as Shadow or Blinky, is the easiest to pick up on, its AI always trying to guide it to Pac-Man as best as possible and the ghost even getting a speed boost when there are few dots left in the maze. While having Blinky on your tail is a fairly common situation, the ghost known either as Speedy or Pinky is actually a strong companion for Blinky since Pinky wants to always head a few spaces ahead of Pac-Man. Since Pinky tries to reach the area two dots ahead of where Pac-Man is facing, this ghost and Blinky can easily sandwich a player who isn’t paying attention to the movement of the two most dangerous spirits in the maze.

Trying to explain the AI of the blue ghost known either as Bashful or Inky is a bit difficult. Inky considers where Blinky and Pac-Man are, draws a hypothetical line from Blinky’s current position to two dots ahead of Pac-Man, extends that line to double its length, and makes the end of that line its target. It’s certainly hard to pick up on naturally and something we only understand because people picked apart the code in years since its release, but this oddly technical means of choosing its destination means Blinky is more of a wild card rather than a ghost you’ll probably be deliberately manipulating, a ghost as often undone by its own eccentricity as it is able to catch you by surprise. The last ghost, and orange one known as either Pokey or Clyde, is a bit simpler to understand. All four ghosts have a period where they’ll try to patrol a designated corner of the maze, but Clyde is the only one who sticks to this game plan once his more complex AI kicks in. At first he’ll want to be closer to Pac-Man, chasing him similar to how Blinky does until he’s about eight dots away from the hero and decides he’d rather go back to patrolling the upper left corner for a bit. Like Inky he can feel more like he’s here to make sure there’s some reactive element that’s hard to manage on the fly since without it, you could almost too easily find a safe path through the maze while keeping the ghosts at bay.

In fact, it actually wasn’t too hard for me to eventually find a relatively safe opener for each new round of Pac-Man based on just what I noticed from ghost movement rather than the deeper knowledge of their AI I got from research. There are some actual movement patterns that are incredibly reliable to follow if you get really deep into playing the game, but the ghost’s movements aren’t the only thing to consider while moving around the maze. 4 of the pellets you need to gobble up are actually Power Pellets, these briefly turning the tables after you’ve bitten into one. Suddenly all of the ghosts will turn a dark blue and run away scared, Pac-Man now able to bite into them to remove them briefly from the maze. Eventually they will return and the power pellet’s effects don’t last for too long so you can’t just breeze through the maze with full power the whole round, but this does allow you to get yourself out of a tight squeeze and is a nice bit of release after spending most of the experience having to avoid the ghosts.

Fruits can also appear near the middle of the maze once you’ve eaten enough dots, these changing depending on how many rounds you are into the game. Score is the main goal of this arcade game so grabbing a fruit will give you a nice surge of points, even the basic cherry worth ten times the value of a normal dot.  Eating ghosts with the power pellet active grants you points too, but as you get into later rounds and new fruits are introduced, they become the best source of points, the game eventually shifting away from things like a strawberry or apple and making later rounds feature things like a key or an enemy ship from Namco’s game Galaxian as the bonus point item instead. The only practical purpose for points is a potential extra life to go on top of the three lives you have to play through a Pac-Man session.

Pac-Man is essentially meant as an endless effort to get points, although the game will eventually become unwinnable if you manage the impressive feat of reaching the glitchy 256th round. However, getting there isn’t very likely, the game having a fairly good difficulty level thanks to the different approaches the ghosts take and a gradual scaling of other factors. When you initially snag a power pellet in the game’s first round, you have six seconds to try and gobble up the dark blue ghosts. However, later rounds begin to decrease this time. By round 5 the ghosts only stay dark blue for two seconds, and while it rises back up to 5 seconds next round, it will eventually reach a point where the power pellet actually has no effect. If you can make it to round 19 where the power pellets no longer provide any benefit save for the ghosts briefly looking in the other direction as they almost consider fleeing you likely can handle playing with this new handicap, but removing it definitely is meant to clear out players and even the simpler decreases in power pellet time from earlier were likely there so that most players drop out before they even get to see the third unique chase scene.

Pac-Man has a lot of smart systems to make its maze navigation more interesting and complex than merely running around trying to collect dots, but the moment you get to the second round you will see perhaps its biggest limiting factor. Pac-Man only has one maze design that it will use for every round. Symmetrical vertically and featuring some small differences so it isn’t symmetrical horizontally, this maze does have two “exits” that let you teleport from one side to the other to give it a little more flexibility in terms of maneuvering, but beyond the power pellet timers changing and seeing different fruits, the experience won’t be changing too much from how it went in the first round. This is one reason some people have been able to mathematically determine safe routes and I was able to extend my own play with just the small one I discovered organically, but clearing out the same maze again and again leads to a gradual wane in appeal. The ghosts do keep the player involved in the action, but Pac-Man feels like it needs more moving parts or variation to really keep people hooked. His wife Ms. Pac-Man would actually get her own game two years later that makes the kind of changes needed to ensure longevity, but commitment to the one maze design is definitely one of the factors that makes Pac-Man a game that is decent fun to play for a bit but not one that is a solid fit for a deeper investment.

THE VERDICT: Pac-Man is well designed for quick play sessions, navigating the maze and grabbing all the dots complicated by ghosts with a varied set of AI instructions that provide a fluidly shifting danger. Power Pellets let you turn the tables as well, but if you do put in some time playing Pac-Man, the single incredibly symmetrical maze design not only loses some of its charm but you can begin to intuit ways to safely snag a good amount of pellets before the danger sets in. Pac-Man is still a game that will likely require some reactive play once you’ve started to understand its design and its reuse of the one layout doesn’t truly feel repetitive so much as it prevents play from evolving over time. Save for the changes to Power Pellets and bonus fruits you get about the same experience in Round 1 as you will round 201, but for a casual bit of quick play, its limited design doesn’t bog it down and gradually emptying the maze of dots can still provide some entertainment.

And so, I give Pac-Man for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. Honestly, I think Pac-Man being decent rather than something exemplary or deep might have been part of its key to success. People were still getting used to video games as a form of entertainment, and if Pac-Man had come in asking for them to invest a lot of time into getting to new stages to see new things, it might not have been so easy for people to casually pop in the quarters for quick play. It would be sitting in a bar and have that same appeal a dartboard might have, the concept easy enough to understand and briefly get involved in but disengaging wasn’t too hard either. The changes Pac-Man undergoes as you progress are understated so someone can feel safe playing only for as long as the game entertains them, so while that single stage design limits its long term appeal, it is the kind of experience most people can dabble in and walk away from with a decent feeling. The game was even designed with the idea this could appeal to people of all ages and genders and based on its huge success it seems like that worked wonders for Namco.

Pac-Man definitely does some things incredibly well, visualizing progress is something I feel does wonders for a game and seeing the dots in the maze disappear urges the player to want to clear the rest to empty it entirely, and the ghost AI has enough unusual coding to it that you’d really need to get deeply involved in the game to fully understand how to consistently overcome it. However, on a basic level it’s not too hard to start to notice a few of the boundaries of the experience, be they in what it offers or how you can sneak in some perfectly safe dot munching to start off each round. The path you take through the maze will determine how hard it is to finish a round, but Pac-Man still slips into the realm of simple fun it shares with something like Space Invaders. Both are easy to return to for a quick bit of entertainment with a few factors to prevent it from being too basic, but they don’t have the portion sizes needed to really make for a riveting long term play session. Video games owe a great debt to Pac-Man and his debut title is certainly one of the easier ones to return to from the early years of games, but like the medium itself there was still room for the ideas put forth here to grow through iteration, evolution, and a deeper understanding of what a video game could be.