What do you think of this fact?
Pac-Man is one of the most famous faces in gaming. But in Japan, where it all started, the game had a slightly different name.
A pizza and a gobbling sound
The game first appeared in arcades in Tokyo in 1980. Its designer, Toru Iwatani, said the character was inspired by a pizza with one slice missing.
The name was a sound effect. According to Malay Mail, “Puck-Man” played on the Japanese word “paku”, meaning to gobble. That’s exactly what the yellow hero does all game long: gobble dots while dodging the ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.
The letter that had to go
For the US market, “Puck” became “Pac”. The reason: it was too easy to change. The Computer History Museum explains that the game was renamed for English-speaking audiences “to prevent vandals from turning ‘PUCK’ into an expletive”. Malay Mail puts it more bluntly: there were fears that gamers would change the P to an F.
The new name didn’t hurt at all. According to ORF, about 400,000 arcade cabinets had been sold by 1982. Guinness World Records later named Pac-Man the most successful coin-operated arcade game of all time.
Iwatani also had a different audience in mind than the alien shoot-em-ups of the time. He aimed the game at women and couples, and the first machine was placed in a cinema in Shibuya to test that idea.
Bonus fact: A perfect game of Pac-Man scores 3,333,360 points. To get there, you have to clear level 256 without losing a life and eat every dot, fruit and ghost along the way.
One pizza, one sound effect and one risky letter: that’s how a gaming icon got its name.