The Four Pac-Man Ghosts All Behave Differently

Pac-Man hit Japanese arcades on May 22, 1980. Toru Iwatani led a nine-person team at Namco that had spent about a year and a half on it; he wanted a game that wasn't another Space Invaders clone, and his stated target audience was women, who weren't going to arcades to shoot aliens. The character's mouth came from rounding the kanji for mouth, 口, into a circle and removing a wedge. The pizza-slice story Iwatani told reporters in interviews — he later called that one a half-truth.

The ghosts are the part of the design most modern players underestimate. They are not four versions of the same chase logic with different colors. Iwatani's team gave each one a distinct algorithm so the game wouldn't feel either random or impossibly hard. Blinky, the red one, takes the shortest path to Pac-Man's current tile. Pinky, the pink one, targets four tiles ahead of where Pac-Man is facing — meant to flank. Inky, cyan, computes its target using both Pac-Man's position and Blinky's, which is why Inky's behavior shifts depending on where the red ghost happens to be. Clyde, orange, chases like Blinky when far from Pac-Man and runs for the lower-left corner when close. The result is a maze where the same input produces different pressure each life.

The game ran on a Z80 with an 8-bit level counter. At level 256, the counter overflows: the right half of the screen renders as garbled tiles and the game can't be completed. Billy Mitchell first hit the screen in 1999 after about six hours of play.

Original Japanese title was Puck Man, onomatopoeia for chewing. Namco renamed it for North America because they expected someone to scratch off the bottom of the P. By 1982, the cabinets had moved 400,000 units worldwide.