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The most popular game of 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 be adapted for Saturday morning television.

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 a Power Up has recently been "eaten."

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. 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.

The original Japanese name for this game was "Puck-Man". It was changed for the US release when marketing noticed how easy and tempting it would be to blot out a bit of the P to undesirably retitle the game.