Japanese game centers in 1979 were dank, smelly dens of vice just for adolescent boys, a place only the bravest girls dared enter. The air reeked of cheap cigarette smoke, and all of the loud, flashy games catered to one specific theme: violence, be it against aliens, tanks, or -- on some of the stranger, lower budget games -- unidentifiable blobs of color.
Designer Toru Iwatani, a man not interested in video games so much as designing things that make people smile, wanted to brighten up the atmosphere inside the arcades. He wanted to turn the man caves into a place where not only might a guy bring his girlfriend on a date but, Heaven forbid, said girlfriend might even come back to on her own.
Iwatani was hired at Namco, a relatively small amusement company, to lead the design efforts of its new video game division in 1977. A fan of the simple, fun games that Atari was creating in the U.S., Iwatani's first games at Namco were variations on one of his favorites, Breakout, a simple ball-and-paddle game that was anything but violent (unless you happened to be a colorful tile apologist). The games did well, and their charming graphics -- particularly the little ghosts in his third game, Cutie Q -- were certainly inspiring smiles, but none of them were particularly inspired or captivating enough to change the arcades in any meaningful way.
In 1979, trying to tap into the female mind and come up with an irresistible concept for his next game, Iwatani spent a lot of time listening to women to find out what they were interested in. Sometimes he'd ask them directly, other times he'd secretly listen in on their conversations with each other, trying to see what they discussed when no boys were around. Mostly they talked about romance and fashion, he says -- neither of which were particularly compelling gameplay concepts -- but a eureka moment came when he heard two ladies talking about eating desserts. Girls, he thought, love eating.
Game design, as Iwatani once said, often begins with something as simple as a word. He focused on the kanji word "taberu" -- "to eat," roughly -- and started sketching ideas in his notebook, coming up with a game that dessert-loving ladies couldn't help but play. This was the genesis of Pac-Man, and the final product, though loved almost equally between the two sexes, was custom tailored to women in just about every way, as this list will show.
1. Food
Taberu. To eat. Eating is at the very core of Pac-Man. It is the player's main function and, indeed, the only thing the player can ever do in the game, other than die. Pac-Man can eat the dots on the screens, the special "power cookies" in the corners, ghosts, keys, bells, characters from other Namco games, and occasionally, some actual fruit.
"Girls love to eat desserts. Munch, munch, munch. My wife often eats sweets, and so she sometimes looks like this," Iwatani said at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, puffing out his cheeks and extending his arms to mime a fat person.
The game's named after the sound of eating. Pac-Man -- or Puck-Man, as it was originally named -- is derived from "pakupaku," which would roughly mean something like "munch munch" in English. The name worked well in Japan, but Iwatani didn't think it made much sense to English speakers.
"You say 'munch munch,' we say 'puck puck,'" Iwatani said."I didn't think that was an American name at all, it was a Japanese name!"
Even Pac-Man himself is modeled after food. As the story goes, the character design for Pac-Man came when Iwatani noticed that a whole pizza, missing one slice, resembled a mouth. Iwatani sketched the shape in his notebook and, with hardly any tweaking at all, Pac-Man was born.
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