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Narrative
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alt title(s): Pac-Man 
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A well-known game from the The Golden Age Of Video Games, and one of the most popular games ever, Pac-Man was the first really successful Maze Game, and one of the first games to be popular with both sexes. It sparked a pop-culture phenomenon, and helped drive the early-1980s video game craze. Ironically, its poorly implemented Atari 2600 port helped bring that craze to an end. It also was the first video game to get an Animated Adaptation, with a reluctant Marty Ingels in the lead role.
The game depicts an abstract round yellow character vaguely reminiscent of a head with a mouth opening and closing to gobble up nearby objects. The player must steer the character around a maze and "eat" all of the dots and four special Power Up pills. Four ghosts pursue the character, and their touch is fatal unless Pac-Man recently ate a Power Up.
The original game famously had no random number generator: The ghosts moved through the maze in a completely predictable pattern. It is said that the ghosts were given different colors to enable the programmers to give each a different "personality" or movement pattern. Top players could develop and memorize specific patterns to clear levels without losing lives.
A sequel, Ms. Pac-Man, was even more popular than the original, and featured more complex mazes and randomized play. However, it wasn't actually an authorized sequel. It started life as a bootleg hack of the original Pac-Man called Crazy Otto, which feature the player character as a Pac man head with legs. GCC, who created that hack, thought this game could be successful and brought the game to Midway, Namco's American distributor. Midway was impressed and, together with the hackers, edited the sprites back into Pac-Man–style sprites and released it without the permission of Namco because Midway wanted a Pac-Man game out while Namco was readying Pac-Man's true sequel, Super Pac-Man. This made Ms. Pac-Man the most popular bootleg video game ever.
Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were known for having lots of bootleg versions, many with altered mazes and graphics. They also had unofficial "speed-up kits" that, added to a legitimate machine, made the game faster and presumably harder.
The franchise continued through an endless array of sequels, including a pinball machine and lots of console adaptations. It continued in the Turn Of The Millennium with 20th Anniversary Pac-Man World, a platformer game with the original mazes as bonus levels, and later with Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness, a puzzle version of the original maze game. The games sold good enough to later spawn two more sequels of Pac-Man World, as well as a kart racing game, Pac-Man World Rally.
It is one of the few games from the Golden Age to still make money in arcades in some form. Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, and Pac-Man were released as a multiple game arcade machine in 2001, with Pac-Man being hidden or not depending on the version of the machine.
The game was originally released in Japan as "Puck-Man". It was changed for the North American release when marketing noticed how easy and tempting it would be to blot out a bit of the P to undesirably retitle the game. Either version of the name is based on the Japanese sound paku-paku for eating.
See also Pac Man Fever.
In 1982, Hanna-Barbera acquired the rights to produce a cartoon based on the game in America, as part of a 90-minute omnibus with The Little Rascals and Richie Rich. Its characters are basically The Flintstones and the plot is basically The Smurfs. Tropes from the cartoon include:
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