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Pac-Man Facts

Pac-Man Facts
Pac-Man is a maze-based arcade game that was released in 1980, created by Toru Iwatani, a Japanese game designer. It was released by Midway in the United States. Pac-Man quickly gained popularity, surpassing games such as Asteroids and Space Invaders to become one of the world's all-time most famous games. In Pac-Man, the player controls the Pac-Man character - which looks like a yellow circle with a missing pie-shape piece (which represents the mouth). Pac-Man eats pac-dots as it travels through the maze. Once all the dots on the screen are eaten he moves to the next level. Pac-Man loses one of his lives if he is touched by Clyde, Inly, Pinky, or Blinky - his enemies.
Interesting Pac-Man Facts:
Originally Pac-Man was released under the name of Puck-Man. 'Puck' came from the Japanese word meaning chomp - 'paku'. It was too close to a four-letter word in English that it was changed to Pac-Man.
Pac-Man was not only one of the most popular games and icons of the 80s but it also is one of the most famous video games of all time.
In the original arcade game, a player could score the highest score possible by obtaining the maximum score on every level - which means scoring 3,333,360 points. This high score was mot reached until 1999, by Billy Mitchell, a pro-gamer. It took him six hours.
Pac-Man's ghost enemies are Blinky (predictable), Pinky (also predictable), Inky (ambushes), and Clyde (random behavior).
In 2005 Guinness Book of World Records awarded Pac-Man the title of Most Successful Coin-Operated Game in 2005.
Pac-Man's designer Toru Iwatani, created the game to help attract more female arcade and video game players.
In the business world the term 'Pac-Man defense' is used to describe a company that manages to carry out a takeover on a company that was trying to acquire it through a hostile takeover.
Some say that Pac-Man's design was inspired by a pizza with a slice out of it.
Atari was given the opportunity to distribute Pac-Man in the beginning but declined. Midway wound up with the profitable deal instead.
Pac-Man the cartoon was the first cartoon to be made after an arcade game. It did not go over very well with audiences and only lasted two seasons.
Pac-Man has appeared in movies such as Tron, and in other video games such as Mortal Kombat.
Google replaced its logo on 2010 in honor of Pac-Man's 30th anniversary - with a playable maze. It was later estimated that because people played while at work it cost the worldwide economy an estimated $120 million.
The 6th person to achieve a perfect game in Pac-Man was David Rice - who completed the game in 3 hours, 33 minutes and just over 12 seconds.
Ms. Pac-Man began as an unauthorized rip-off of Pac-Man. Two MIT students created the game and called it Crazy Otto. The students later sold it to Namco and avoided a lawsuit.
Pac-Man appears in the 2015 movie Pixels, and Pac-Man's creator makes a cameo in the film as well.


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