As for Pac-Man, he can power up by eating one of four blinking power pellets located in the corners of the maze. The ghosts work together to try to corner and catch Pac-Man. There are four ghosts who chase Pac-Man, each with different names and personalities, such as the chaser and the ambusher. The player controls Pac-Man while attempting to eat all the dots in the maze and avoid getting caught by the ghosts through an extremely simple user interface consisting only of a single joystick. But it's interesting to look on Namco's official Pac-Man site and look at a description of the rules and the game play: It's still fun to play.'Īnyone who has played Pac-Man can probably sum up the rules in a few seconds, as Meretzky suggested. Even if you're a rank newbie, level one doesn't feel like a horrible crushing experience. Even if you are a super expert and you're playing it for the zillionth time, level one isn't boring. 'It's just incredibly well-crafted,' he said. In addition, Meretzky said, Pac-Man had something for everyone, be it a first-timer or someone who had spent countless dollars in quarters on it. 'It was a game everyone felt comfortable playing, even in the setting of an arcade, and that's why it became so universally popular.' 'Pretty much anyone could watch someone playing it for 10 seconds and understand everything about it,' said Steve Meretzky, a veteran game designer who created famous Infocom titles like Leather Goddesses of Phobos and the game version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was really the first time, where people looked at video games not merely as this odd thing that teenage boys would their quarters into, but which had much broader social significance.' 'It was by no means the first, but earlier offerings, no matter how compelling to nerds like me.Pac-Man was really the first what I would call the broad cross-section of society, men and women. 'I think there's no question that Pac-Man was sort of a watershed event in the popularity and possibilities of video games,' said Richard Garriott, a veteran designer known for his pioneering work on Ultima and Ultima Online, as well as his leading roles on Lineage, City of Heroes, and Tabula Rasa.

And unlike so many of the hit games that have come and gone since then, the little yellow disc with the missing pie-slice for a mouth has become a legend in the video games industry, as well as an inspiration for many of the best-known designers in the field. And on Saturday, Pac-Man celebrates its 30th anniversary. Regardless, a global phenomenon was born that day. The title was rejected in the United States because some worried that the 'P' would chip off the cabinet and look like an 'F.' On May 22, 1980, a Japanese company called Namco Bandai released a game in Japan called Puck-Man.

Pac man 30th anniversary final