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I can’t believe Pac-Man is 35 years old today (Friday, May 22nd)….the beginning of game time in my opinion!
Hope you enjoy a little bit of history!
Pac-Man, the biggest arcade game of all time, turns 35 today.
Here’s a look back at the era when Pac-Man fever ruled the world.
Released by the Japanese company Namco on May 22, 1980, Pac-Man was like nothing else at the time. At a time when Space Invaders and Asteroids and other games with abstracted, monochrome graphics ruled the arcade, Pac-Man offered a colorful cartoonish design with an appealing central character. It revolved around eating, not shooting; and it was designed to appeal to young women and couples, not dudes in sketchy bowling-alley bars (although they all played it too).
The colorful design and unique collect-the-dots maze gameplay—plus the wonderful tension of running away from those darned ghosts, then scrambling to eat them once you got a power pellet—made Pac-Man almost instantly addictive, eating quarters as rapaciously as its protagonist swallowed pixels. By one count, Namco sold 400,000 Pac-Man machines, head and shoulders above anything that had come before, or since. And it’s still highly playable and popular in a way its contemporaries are not—few people are paying for Asteroids or Space Invaders updates today, but Namco Bandai still makes and sells variations on Pac-Man on every platform imaginable.
But Pac-Man was more than a hit game. It was a genuine cultural inflection point. Everywhere you looked, there was Pac-Man: On boxes of breakfast cereal, on television, even on the radio. It marked the first time a particular videogame and its iconography became as culturally relevant as a hit TV show or movie. The era of abstract Pong paddles and blocky spaceships was over—it was lovable characters like Pac that were going to be the face of games from now on. Pac-Man was gaming’s first true franchise, in a way that most successful games today spawn spin-offs and sequels.
Pac-Man’s ubiquity was our first indication that games were about to become the dominant entertainment medium of the information age. (It also arguably marked the beginning of Japan’s impending pop-cultural invasion of the rest of the world, even if players at the time didn’t know where it came from.)
And we’re all really going to feel old in 5 years when Pac turns 40.
Pac-Man Turns 35 Today. 
