I don’t see that with modern games – they are very complex. You should be able to explain the objective in no more than two sentences. When you look at a game, you must be able to understand what to do immediately. Iwatani wanted players to be drawn to his new game: This element created too much frustration during play testing and so was removed in the final code. One feature dropped were shutters, that opened and closed, blocking the path of the maze at certain points. Warp tunnels were added late in the game’s development, and the power pills came about after an episode of Popeye resonated with the team, showing the hero of the cartoon eating a can of spinach and turning the tables on his nemesis Bluto.
Once we began running out of ideas, we put in things like Galaxians and keys. The initial concept for the fruit bonuses sprung from the notion that the drawings on slot machines found in casinos were American and cool.īecause Pac-Man was a game about eating, we started by adding cherries, strawberries, oranges, and other fruit. As design concepts, both Pac-Man and the ghosts had a simplicity and endearing charm. Despite suggestions of adding eyes, hair and other features to Pac-Man, he remained resolute, choosing to keep a clear, bold yellow character. Adding the ghosts, gave a “Tom & Jerry” scenario, that he thought would appeal to a wide audience. He made Pac-Man friendly, so that people could identify with him. With a mouthful of hot pizza, he looked down and saw the character looking back at him. The design for Pac himself came to Iwatani after ordering a pizza and removing a single slice. The ideas came thick and fast, and were tweaked or dropped to suit the game over an 18 month development period. I figured that a game made in the image of a culinary environment and based around the verb “to eat” could be fun.Īnd so, together with a team of eight programmers and designers, Iwatani started work on his opus. In those days, there was a proliferation of table top games, including a considerable number of game machines installed in cafés and other businesses. I thought up a variety of verbs, such as “grab” and “surround”. When it came time to figure out what sort of game I could do, I suggested basing it around a particular verb. My aim was to come up with a game that had an endearing charm, was easy to play, involved lots of light-hearted fun, and that women and couples could enjoy. The only videogames on offer were brutal affairs involving the killing of aliens. In the late Seventies, videogame arcades, which in Japan we call ‘game centres’, were just playgrounds for boys and young men. Rather than focus on shooting things, Iwatani explored themes that might appeal to families and females, who up to this point, hadn’t embraced video games in the same way that men of the world had: He was inspired by the “happy” nature of the games he saw coming from Atari, and sought to imitate this model. Iwatani-san was seeing the market domination of these “me-too” early shoot-em-ups of the time, and took inspiration from Atari across the pond, who were receiving massive adulation (and income) for its games, which were bright, colourful, and followed many different themes and concepts. Galaxian was a huge hit, taking the basic concept of Space Invaders, but adding kamikaze enemies into the mix, that dive-bombed the player. Buoyed by it’s success, Namco followed this up by 1979’s Galaxian, the first ever video game to use colour RGB graphics, something of a revolution at the time. And so it came to pass that Namco had some early success with it’s first arcade video game, Gee Bee, developed by Iwatani. Repairing hardware wasn’t where Toru wanted to be at the time – he was a big fan of pinball, and suggested to his bosses that he worked on a video version of pinball. His first role within the business was to repair failed game boards from licensed black and white Atari video games that were distributed throughout Japan. Pac-Man’s creator, Toru Iwatani joined Namco in 1977 aged 22, when it was still known as Nakamura Manufacturing. They just placed more machines on the floor to get more coins into the cash boxes quicker – this was good news for them and good news for Namco. This was seen as a sensible strategy in the face of losing potential income from customers having to queue to get a game. Indeed, merchandise and endorsements earned Namco more in revenues than actual hardware sales of the game.Īcross the globe, instead of ordering a single unit of the new games as was usual, operators placed orders for multiple cabinets, such was the demand. Everybody has at least heard of the game, because it was one of the first to enter the realms of popular culture. This was a huge game for Namco back in the early eighties that would grow into a true 20th century icon.
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