The Pac-Man Who Sold the World

When evolution becomes revolution.

This week marks a major anniversary! Not a wedding, not a birthday, not a national founding. No, something far more important: the debut of Pac-Man! 

There are many lessons to be learned from Pac-Man. The creator of Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri, calls it “a textbook for game designers.” In the tech world it is common to categorize progress in terms of “evolutionary” or “revolutionary,” meaning merely incremental or truly transformative, and never the twain shall meet. For insance, the original iPhone is revoloutionary. But the iPhone 14? Only evolutionary. Pac-Man is the rare case of a product that is both. It shows that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to launch a revolution. Multiple ones, in fact. The game’s success charted a new direction for gaming as a whole. And it presaged the role young Japanese women would play as tech-trendsetters in the decades to come.

Two years back, I interviewed creator Toru Iwatani for a Kotaku piece celebrating the game’s fortieth anniversary. That let me go into a lot more detail about this seemingly silly but really quite extraordinary game in far more detail than I could in Pure Invention. You can read the Kotaku article here, and I highly recommend you do, if for no other reason than to remember that Pac-Man breakfast cereal launched the career of a highly regarded Hollywood star. Can you spot him in larval form?

Saturday morning sugar bombs aside, this is serious stuff. Today it is a given that games represent a medium unto themselves: that they can contain memorable characters, that they can provide experiences rivaling the pull of literature, television or film, and that they can weave themselves into the fabric of daily life. Before Pac-Man, we didn’t know any of these things; after it, we did. It was that pivotal. 

The very first Pac-Man machine appeared in a Shibuya arcade in 1980, forty-two years ago this last Monday. Like so many pivotal innovations I covered in the book, it didn’t make much of a bang at first. Was it a failure? So it seemed. Yet as we all know now, it wasn’t. It just turned out the industry was initially looking at the wrong metrics. 

Arcades of the era, both in Japan and the US, were dominated by digital machismo, offering aggressive experiences centering on death-defying physical feats: climbing, racing, shooting, sieging, failing to save humanity from nuclear holocaust, etc. Anyone who spent time in arcades then, such as seven-year-old me whenever he could cadge enough quarters from his parents, recalls that our daily soundscapes were gloriously apocalyptic cacophonies of human shouts, digitized laser-blasts, explosions, and ominously garbled robo-voices proclaiming our imminent doom.

Iwatani had a hunch that there might be room in the arcade warzone for something more meditative, based not in bloodsport but the downright quotidian: eating. Players maneuvered Pac-Man, itself said to have been modeled after a partially-eaten pizza, through a maze filled with food pellets and enticing bunches of fruit. The enemies took the form of what appeared to be ghosts in colorful sheets. Players couldn’t kill the ghosts, but they could pop “power pills” to turn the tables, ingest the attackers, and banish them for a time. It was frantic and gentle all at once, set to an upbeat soundtrack, with a colorful mixture of primaries and pastels that made the characters pop on the screen like none then or arguably since. This was the start of an entirely new gaming experience. Pac-Man was the kind of thing that made you smile when you played. 

Pac-Man didn’t fare well at first against its more boisterous counterparts. But something interesting was at work. Iwatani and his team, who staked out arcades to track the success of their handiwork, noticed that while traditional gamers — men — weren’t flocking to the machines, an entirely new audience was: young women and kids. Today this is so common as to be unremarkable, but it was mind-blowing back in 1980. At the time everyone assumed games were for adults, namely adult males. The first commercially successful video game, Pong, debuted in an American bar. In Japan, video games competed head to head with pachinko for the hundred-yen coins of a largely male audience. Pac-Man flipped the script.

Its success pioneered an entirely new market for what Western designers started calling “cutie games,” as Japanese hits like Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Frogger leapt into American arcades. These in turn helped make video gaming a more welcoming and diverse space. A sequel to Pac-Man came out in 1982, designed entirely by Americans because Iwatani dragged his heels creating a follow-up. They called it Ms. Pac-Man – giving video gaming its first female protagonist, while openly acknowledging the demographic that had made the original such a huge hit. (And, it seems, establishing “Pac-Man” as a surname rather than a descriptor. Who knew?)

There were “maze-runners” before Pac-Man, but none anywhere as insanely and relentlessly kawaii as Iwatani’s. That proved to be the tipping point. By embracing those sensibilities, Iwatani paved the way for a revolution — not only in games but the Japanese tech industry as a whole. By the mid-1990s, only a decade or so after Pac-Man’s debut, young Japanese women emerged from the tech-shadows to become the primary drivers of tech through their consumption habits. Their hunger for karaoke spurred new forms of digital storage and transmission; their hunger for connection pioneered new forms of communication such as selfies, texting, and emojis. Sanrio pocket-pagers and wildly decorated feature-phones became must-have accessories for any girl out on the town. Wired magazine lauched a “Japanese Schoolgirl Watch” column to track these “doyennes of personal tech.”

By the early 21st century, young women had become such ferociously savvy tech consumers that they had the power to topple even titans of industry. Think of the iPhone in 2007. It was a massive hit everywhere with just one exception: Japan. The reason was simple. Apple, assuming what they sold in America would sell everywhere, neglected to include an emoji palette. Japanese women stayed away from the device in droves — and so did everyone else. Due to differing cell phone standards of the era, couples needed to buy the same devices to easily text with one another. If the wives and girlfriends of consumers wouldn’t buy iPhones, neither would they.

Softbank and Apple scrambled to rectify the situation, and sales quickly recovered. But it was a lesson: ignore those outside your assumed demographic at your own peril. You never know when they’ve taken a “power pill” and are about to eat your lunch.