Pac-Man is a maze-chase arcade game in which the player guides a round, mouth-shaped character through a maze, eating dots while being pursued by four colored ghosts, and turning the tables by eating power pellets that briefly make the ghosts vulnerable. It was designed by Toru Iwatani and released by Namco in Japan in 1980, with Midway distributing it in the United States. The Strong National Museum of Play, which preserves the game in its collections, records that Pac-Man was “created by programmer Toru Iwatani in 1980 and released by Namco in Japan and Midway in the United States,” and that it “made video games a mass cultural phenomenon” while becoming “the best-selling arcade video game ever.”
What made Pac-Man a landmark was its deliberate departure from the prevailing style of arcade games. The dominant titles of the late 1970s were combat-themed, war and space-shooter games aimed at a narrow audience. Iwatani set out to design something approachable and “comical” that women and couples could enjoy, building the game around eating rather than shooting. The Strong notes that the name derives from the Japanese onomatopoeic “paku-paku,” describing the motion of the mouth, and that the character’s shape came from simplifying and rounding the Japanese character for “mouth.”
The design introduced ideas that became staples of game design. Each of the four ghosts had its own pursuit behavior, giving the simple maze a sense of distinct adversaries with personalities, and Iwatani has described tuning these movement patterns as the hardest part of the project. The game also wove in small reprieves, the power pellets and bonus fruit, that gave players moments of agency and reward, and it presented a friendly, cartoon-like character rather than an abstract shape or a weapon.
Pac-Man’s cultural reach went far beyond the arcade. The Strong calls its title character “the first iconic ambassador of the video game era,” and the game spawned merchandise, a hit song, an animated television series, and a recognizable mascot, demonstrating that a video game could become a mainstream brand. In 2015 The Strong inducted Pac-Man into the inaugural class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
Released in 1980, the precise public-launch day is usually given as late May; the museum primary record confirms the year, so the day here is reported with caution. Its lasting significance is that it widened the audience for video games and proved that charm and accessible design, not just faster action, could define a hit.