Gaming's One True Sun

My fifth blog post today will be a celebration of a gaming icon that recently just turned the big 3-OH, now I know straight away you’re racking your brains trying to think of gaming icons that are such a reasonably young age. “Surely everyone that big in gaming is a touch older?” Ladies and gentleman, happy belated birthday PAC MAN!

Yes, that’s right everyone’s favourite yellow man is the wrong side of 29. Let us take a stroll down Memory (aah see that? Reasonably passable computer joke) Lane.

Pac-Man released on May 22^nd 1980 and developed and published by Namco stormed the arcades and instantly became a massive hit. Holding people’s pockets hostage for the tidy sum of a quarter a time. Even today 30 years down the line, our little yellow friend is as popular as he has always been, primarily due to the simplicity in the games controls and premise. Collect the dots eat the power pellets then eat the ghosts but don’t let the ghosts touch you unless you have eaten the power pellets.

Not only is Pac-Man as popular as it has ever been but all the Pac-Man clones and spin offs that came about seem to retain their popularity also. The most notable Pac-Man spin off is very probably Ms Pac-Man hailed as some gamers to be superior to the original.

An interesting fact, that I didn’t know but you probably did is that the ghosts in Pac-Man have names… in japan they were known as Macky, Micky, Mucky and Mocky (red, pink, cyan and orange respectively) and in the western world they had better names all together and those were Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. I particularly love the fact that instead of calling the orange ghost/monster a name that ended in –inky they chose to go for a totally random name.

Something this awesome deserves to be around for ever and hopefully in 30 years, when I am 49 I will be able to say, Happy 60^th Pac-Man. But only time will tell.