Pac-Man in a Strange New World

The occasion was the Xbox Live Arcade re-release of the venerable game on its 25th anniversary. Pac-Man has been retrofitted for Microsoft's spanking new techno marvel, the Xbox 360. Bill Gates and co. have spent an immense amount of sweat and equity on a system designed for games like Gears of War, which has something to do with saving earth from a race of evil locust people rising from the bowels of hell to enslave humanity. So why is a simple game like Pac-Man - in which the titular hero runs around a maze gobbling small pills and eluding ghosts - being reintroduced with such hoopla? And in an industry obsessed with progress, why is something a quarter of a century old coming to an Xbox near you with absolutely no enhancements?

In the early 1980s, Pac-Man was a phenomenon without parallel. There was the Pac-Man TV show, a Pac-Man song; Pac-Man even appeared on the front cover of Time magazine as a metaphor for crooked politicians and their tendency to gobble cash and resources. He was a pop-culture sensation that could only have occurred at the dawn of the blockbuster era, a time when the George Lucasian sheen of hype and marketing started to eclipse content. The rise of movie sequels like Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and MTV-ready bands like Duran Duran proved that pop culture events were increasingly the result of strategic planning rather than genuine, spontaneous public interest. Pac-Man, on the other hand, just happened. He munched his way into this new universe with shocking voracity. He became the icon of a brand new age. There will never be another videogame with such sweeping influence.

Pac-Man was the brainchild of designer Toru Iwatani at Japanese gaming company Namco. Legend tells us that the primary inspiration for the glabrous yellow hero was a slice of pizza sitting on Iwatani's desk. (There are numerous theories as to Pac-Man's inception; the common theme appears to be gorging.) The game’s Japanese launch in 1979 met with middling response. This was, after all, the era of Space Invaders, a halcyon time when 30 pixels suitably arranged on a monitor comprised a videogame; nascent gamers insisted on killing aliens, even if the aliens didn't look like much of anything. Then, something strange and inexplicable occurred: Pac-Man caught on. Repackaged and released in North America in 1980 by Bally/Midway Games, Pac-Man represented a Gladwellesque tipping point: the moment that brought videogames into the collective consciousness.