Short Nerd Chief

According to Wired, on October 10, 1979, Pac-Man (nee Pack-Man) was introduced in Japan

While it wasn’t the first videogame — arcade games, including video ones, had existed for years — Pac-Man turned videogaming into a phenomenon by burning it into the collective consciousness in a way that previous games did not.

The brainchild of Toru Iwatani, a designer for Namco, a Japanese software company, Pac-Man is a model of complex simplicity. The concept — the player controls a blob with a mouth that navigates a two-dimensional maze, eating dots and ghosts while trying to avoid being eaten itself — could have been dreamed up by a 10 year old. But try racking up big points; ah, there’s the rub.

Actually, racking up big points in the original Pac-Man wasn’t all that hard if you knew the pattern to follow. My sister was good at Pac-Man for just that reason, but I found it to be boring after a while. I had a book in the early 1980s that gave tips on playing arcade games, and it included the Pac-Man pattern, as well as a bunch of tips for other games that had their own flow you could use to your advantage. The AI in most games now makes this impossible, of course, but in 1982 it was a different world.

I never much cared for Pac-Man or his progeny, but I loved the arcade. I didn’t like Asteroids much either, as once you got good, it was a lot of “shoot all but one fragment, fly around and blast UFOs” and got dull. I liked Galaga and Jungle King a lot more. When is the Jungle King Ultimate 3-D Adventure coming out for XBox? Or maybe it’s more suited for the Wiimote.