Pac-Man turns thirty

Buckner and Garcia,1981

Consider that Pac-Man is the only videogame in history that has a billboard top 10 hit song about it. That should tell you something about just how much of a phenomenon it was when it hit unsuspecting video arcades on May 22,1980. Thirty years later,it continues to be published in some form or the other,making it easily the most published videogame ever. Its been a movie,a cartoon show,a breakfast cereal,a board game. It was the first completely interactive Google doodle. Pac-Man is bigger than Lara Croft,bigger than Halo,bigger than anything in the history of gaming,except perhaps a certain Italian plumber. His girlfriend,Ms Pac-Man was a global spokesperson for breast cancer awareness. Counter-Strike nerds and NFS loyalists,eat your heart out. A yellow pizza-pie based creature pWns your daddy,kids. Pac-Man is the real deal.

Before Pac-Man hit arcades,gaming was a predominantly male domain. Space Invaders,Asteroids and Donkey Kong were hardcore and difficult games that catered to young male gamers,who would pour quarters into the machines while their girlfriends waited impatiently. With Pac-Mans abstract,gender-agnostic appeal,the girlfriends could jump in,too. It was the first game to break this all-important barrier and for that achievement alone it deserves a place in the hall of fame.

With Pac-Man (the English title is an adaptation of the original Japanese Pakkuman),Toru Iwatani went against the grain of prevalent arcade game design and simplified controls,doing away with the jump/shoot button altogether. One joystick,4 possible directions in which to move Pac-Man,and that was it. The rest was a beautiful test of skillanticipation,coordination,reflexes and pattern-recognition. Pac-Man was an early example of easy to learn,difficult to master,an essential game design principle that too many modern games struggle to adhere to. This elegant simplicity is what helped Pac-Man gain so much popularity; it transcended the medium and became one of the most recognisable pop-culture icons of 80s America.

Pac-Man was also a game of wonderful,almost psychedelic audio-visual glory. The bright colours and the hypnotic pac-pac-pac sound combined to make the gameplay experience strangely engaging and perhaps contributed to the fact that people found it impossible to stop playing. The old trick of being able to enter your initials into the hi-score records also provided a great incentive to keep the quarters flowing into the famous insert-coin slot. The recently rebooted Pac-Man: Championship edition takes this appeal to a whole new level altogether,using next-gen graphic processing power yet retaining the essence of Pac-Man to create the best modern iteration of the classic game.

If you have Xbox LIVE or an iPhone,you owe it to yourself to get it,just for many more hours of classic Pac-Man gameplay. Its a tribute to Iwatanis game design genius that through the years,on multiple platforms,the core gameplay of Pac-Man remains essentially the same. No leap to 3-D,no role-playing elements,no genre-blending has been necessary to keep Pac-Man appealing to new generations of gamersthe original works just fine.

Another important cultural contribution thats not always remembered is the Pac-Man Elbow epidemic that swept the US soon after the game arrived in arcades. This was a form of tendonitis that was developed by players due to long hours of playingthanks to Pac-Mans uncomfortable left-handed joystick. Pac-Man Elbow hence became the first medical condition named after a videogame,a category that was monopolised by actual sports until then. The Koreans,who refer to video games as e-sports,would have been delighted.

Pac-Man is seminal because it helped videogames break into the mainstream awareness like no other videogame before it and few since. In the 30 years since it first arrived,so much has changedmotion-control,hi-definition graphics and processing power have ensured that mainstream videogames are practically unrecognisable from what they used to be when Pac-Man first arrived. But,thankfully,some things have stayed the same. Pac-Man remains incredibly fun to play for gamers of all kinds.

The author is a game designer and gaming journalist based in Mumbai