September 18, 2025 • 37 mins
As one of the most iconic games in all of arcade history, Pac Man is recognized across the planet. But how did it get here -- and why are there so many in-depth fan theories about what it means? Is Pac Man a Sisyphean immortal cursed with endless toil? Is he underwater, stealing errant Pong balls? Is he himself a ghost, or on drugs? In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max unravel the bizarre, inspiring origin story of one of history's greatest video games.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our favorite
video game ghost super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Walker walk a Max sorry teenage riot.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Oh that's a cut I wasn't expecting, but I love it.
That's Noel Brown. I'm ben bowling before we go.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, I'll tell you all that. Yeah, I've decided on
the next tattoo already.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh good.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, it's gonna be the third Empire symbol on the
inner bicep in.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
The at arm. You know, you know, I don't. Is
it Star Trek related.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It's Claire obscure related, older scrolls, elder scrolls. That's right, okay,
you know all right, And thank you for not saying
inner thigh, which I thought you were about to describe.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Look.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Uh, we have a great research brief from our pal
friend of the show and north star Andrea, who I
don't think has a ridiculous street name yet.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
No Andrea. The words the word carpenter, sharpentier.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Okay, I like a rhyme, you know, almost sucker for rhyme.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Nol. He had to, we had to do it to him,
or it might be pronounced sharpent a, in which case
she is the word carpenter.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
All right. Uh, and Andrea, as we know, is one
of our go to correspondence for all things pop culture, novels.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Nerd culture, gaming comics. He's particularly a fan of and
I would argue that this is a great intersection of
those because we've got a lot of graphic art components
to some of these early video games that become iconic
and that really leave an imprint on art moving forward,
like the Space Invader guy you know that does all
(02:20):
the tags. Those are basically little blinky characters from the
pac Man games. Because they didn't have that much to
work with, they had to do a lot with a
little and make these things eye catching. M M.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
One hundred percent. Yeah, And that's why a lot of
earlier video games are legendarily difficult because they couldn't make
the graphic super tasty, so don't had to make the
gameplay super difficult.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
It's true, for sure. And then move a little later,
we started to see smovie tie in video games that
actually had a little bit more of a look that
matched the games because in the early days Atari and stuff.
You had to really use your imagination and stretch it
to its bounds to make the cover art match anything remotely,
you know what the gameplay was. The et MA is
(03:11):
a perfect example. But apparently the Lion King video game
for Sega Genesis is an example of a game that
was so punishingly difficult. It was designed to get kids
to continuously rent the game from Blockbuster Video.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, and then we see another thing like, oh gosh,
what's a really difficult one? Captain Planet unfair because the
message was saving the world is hard, but they did it. Oh,
we're talking about a much more simplistic game today. We're
talking about pac Man. Who hasn't played it, who doesn't
(03:51):
enjoy it. It's not a huge commitment unless you're very
good at it. And it turns out, as Andrea taught
us recently, that pac has quite a complicated backstory. And
get this, it is forty five years old as of
May this year.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Only forty five. I know, I thought it would be older.
I thought it would be older too. That's just a
couple of years older than us. And Andrea did a
great job setting the tone for this episode, and this
brief with some still frame images from the Wonderful movie
based on a graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim versus the World,
and a lot of us who are familiar with this
(04:30):
might have gotten the most I guess relatively obscure. A
bit of backstory for pac Man from a scene with
Scott played by what's his face Michael Sarah where he's
trying to impress a girl and he asks her, did
you know that the original name for pac Man was
puck Mann.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yeah, you would think it was because he looks like
a hockey puck, but it actually comes from the Japanese
phrase pacu paku, which means to one's mouth open and closed.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
It is funny because it's one of those chicken or
the egg things where it's like, if they had called
him puck Man, would history have just reflected that and
just we would just that would be what we would
think of puck Man? Or your immediate thought is no,
that's just wrong. That would have been bad and it
would have been a failure. I don't know if that's
true or not, but it is interesting pac Man. Something
(05:24):
about it just does have a little bit more of
a ring to it, and I love that it's associated
with that automnopeia of the sound of flapping one's mouth
open and closed, which in Japan certainly would have resonated.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
And it also brings us to an excellent segue into
the fan theory origin stories about the provenance of pac Man.
It turns out there's a lot of mythology surrounding the game,
the backstory of the man himself, the pac himself, and
other aspects of the world they build there. One of
(05:58):
our favorites is that both mister and Missus pac Man
are serial killers. This comes to us from The Daily
Show writer Dan McCoy.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
That's true. Well are they killers though, or are they
ghost hunters?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
So this is what Dan is pitching. While back he
went on Twitter, back when it was called Twitter, and
he said, guys, here's what I think. The pac Man
couple are serial killers, and they've been hiding their victims
under a maze, and the ghosts that are chasing them
are actually the spirits of their earlier victims, haunting them.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I appreciate what he's doing here. I appreciate the commitment
to the bit. I would argue that he is inserting
information that does not exist. I would say more likely
that pac Man and Miss pac Man are Ghostbuster type figures.
They're there to hoover up these spooky ghosts that are
out haunting the maze, which is, I guess, the world
(06:54):
in which they occupy. I do love this next point
that he makes though, which has always occurred to me
about this game and also Doctor Mario, where he's just
literally homeboys just chucking pills into the you know, the
puzzle window of the game. But yeah, we know pac
Man loves gobbling up these little pellets that a little
pill like themselves, aren't they.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, this one is uh, this one is more Internet
ephemera and we can't specifically trace it to Dan McCoy.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The idea is that, like you said, no, old pac
Man is eating too many pellets aka drugs, and he's hallucinating,
so he's seen ghost because he's a party too hard.
And the other one, the other related theory is that
pac Man is in a club having too good of
(07:46):
a time and then he bumps into a ghost.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah. Or another theory too, is that the creator of
pac Man, who has some addiction struggles himself, used this
as an elaborate metaphor of his time spent in rehab
being haunted by the ghosts of his addiction. I think
that's beautiful. I think it's a little unlikely, but you know,
maybe so man. Maybe it is like a total work
(08:11):
of art that is mirroring his struggle with pill addiction.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Or maybe it's fan fiction and there's nothing wrong with that.
We also want to shout out a Reddit user gm
Caros who does a little bit of multiversal world building.
It says that we all know the game Pong Pong
came out in nineteen seventy two, eight years before pac
Man came out in nineteen eighty, and gm Caro says,
(08:39):
what if some balls from Pong fell off the sides
of the.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Board, which they do if you miss deflecting them, where
do they go?
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Where do they go? Maybe they go on the pac
Man maze below, And maybe pac Man is our video
game Sissyphis and he just has to eat up these
lost balls forever.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Is he Sissyphis or is he the minota of the maize?
You know it? And he does have one eye? Does
he even have an eye?
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well, we are not the people to answer that question,
but it's also you know, it's a two D game,
right that doesn't have an eye in the original game.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
He's just a yellow cheese wheel with one section removed. Yeah,
it's just a cheese pizza with one slice taken. And
now we go to sid Lexia, writing in February of
two thousand and eight, who gets a bit nihilistically philosophical
about pac Man. Sorry, I'm playing a web based version
(09:38):
of pac Man real quick right now, just to remind myself. So,
the ghosts are sort of like held in the middle
until they're released, and then you have to turn when
they're blue. You can eat them only when they turn blue,
and all the while you're gobbling up pills, and then
you also want to get the little bright shiny pills.
That's what turns them blue. Sorry, y'all, just reminding everyone
(10:01):
of how pac Man works. It's a pretty complex mechanic
if you think about how simple the game is. And
I've never gotten past like, you know, three or four stages.
It's not easy for sure.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Again, if you can't make it pretty, you can't make
it easy. So going back to sid Lexia, who says
the following quote, thus far the twenty first century has
been a sort of an odd time for video games.
We've seem drastic increases in graphical presentation, and it's becoming
increasingly probable that video games will offer up environments that
(10:34):
are visually indistinguishable from the real world within my lifetime.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, we're still not quite there, but we're getting there.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Prescient and and sid Lexi points out the games are
becoming more realistic in other areas to using special controls
that get you know what it reminds me of. No,
Sid here is referencing we Sports and Guitar Hero, but
it reminds me of especially of things like Microsoft Simulator
(11:04):
Flight Simulator, which I, as you know, in a continuing
weird side mission, I play that simulator a lot.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
I know it's super cool man, and that's I mean
similar controls to the way you know, flight flighted vehicles
might operate to within other games Star Fucks and stuff
like that, right, m.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
And then we go into an earlier conversation we had
on stuff they don't want you to know about the
genre of things God.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
God, Yeah, fascinating, which would include technically things like the
sims where you're sort of this you know, all knowing
unseen hand sort of moving the inhabitants of this world
that you've created through the paces of their day to
day lives. These games don't really require super super, super
(11:52):
super intense in depth, you know, high level graphics, because
it's more about the interface they've designed, uh and the
largeness the scale of the world. You know. Another good
example of that would be something like Minecraft, which is
a modern example of you know, using limitations to your benefit.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Mm hmm, yeah, well said. We also see that, sid Lexia.
After pointing out these breakthroughs and the studying escalation and
sophistication of video game technology, Sid finds that only one
game has ever managed to really address the authentic simulation
(12:32):
of the real world, by which this writer means the
quote complete futility of human existence in the Western line.
We told you it would be nihilistic that game, says
Sid Is pac Man, and our author here goes into depth,
but I think we go with the recap and let's
(12:54):
just put on our philosophy hats and maybe round robin
this one.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Your individual life on this planet is completely insignificant, and
it is largely characterized by the grim capitalist system that
you were born into. You are doomed to a miserable existence,
which will be spent endlessly collecting brightly colored consumer oriented products.
You can attempt to alleviate your sorrow with needles or pills,
but such efforts will inevitably fail. Furthermore, you are predestined
(13:22):
to die, and you will probably not accomplish anything of
merit before this occurs. So I guess technically, games like
pac Man are what you would call today roguelike games,
where the deal is that you will inevitably die. There
is a you know, you want to push it as
far as you can go, you know, rack up as
(13:43):
many points, but the nature of the game is that
you are predestined for expiration.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
For failure again Sisaphian.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yeah, correct, just jump in here. Roguelike traditionally being that
it will always reset, you don't haveesothetically die. So for example,
like Blue Prince, which is a new puzzle rogue leg game,
you could win, but you can't just keep playing it.
We'll restart.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Okay, so it's no wait a minute, aren't there? But
aren't there? So you know what I mean? Technically, You
know a pac Man involves a dungeon. That pac Man
is a dungeon and crawl is it not? It kind
of very much, is yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And this is where they continue and say, so, now
that you know your life is pointless, you might as
well do what pac Man does. Go cry in the corner.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Ouch. Ouch. Shit. He does sort of cry at the end,
doesn't he. He's got little tears that squirt on out.
So when down the stown there. So, now that we've
wrapped our heads around what type of game this is
and sort of what came from it, it's true endless
(14:56):
cry in the Yes, it's this endless loop, right, That
is the nature of the pac Man game. It is
the Sisyphian struggle. So he's crying in the corner after
he you know, needs a little break from this endless
cycle of you know, absolutely defeated by life. So there
is a little trick, however, that he can employ when
a new level starts. Going back to the text, move
(15:18):
pac Man one space to the right and three spaces up,
then stop. The ghosts will leave him alone for about
fifteen minutes or so. It's true. This is wow. It's
a credit Nobo.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So say continues when your feeling like life is completely
hopeless and it is, disagree with it, find yourself a
cozy little corner to cry in. I can't guarantee that
your demons will leave you alone for at least fifteen minutes,
but you'll feel a lot better regardless. So now we're
going past philosophy into literature. Right at this point, this
(15:53):
is a weird meditation on pac Man.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I think this is fantastic and i'd see and I
see all of these parallels, whether there are intentional or not,
it absolutely holds, and I think it works beautifully.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, it squares with the reality of the game. And
before Lexia comes along, there's a publication called Trigger Happy
by Stephen Poole. It's a book entirely about video games,
and here pull kind of dovetails with the concepts later
proposed by Lexia. Because Poole says pac Man again, I
(16:28):
keep I introduced, and I keep using word Sisipian. But
pac Man is on this endless quest to become whole,
consumed by consumerism and therefore never achieving true satisfaction. Interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, no, it's mega interesting, Ben, And I mean also
considering the uh particulars of the Japanese rat race, you
know what I mean? Like it is, I can see
how this maybe even would have hit home on a
cultural line, you know over there, right, because I mean,
like we talk about salarymen literally passing out in subways
(17:05):
because they've had to drink their bosses under the table
as part of the sort of social contract of you know,
business life. These things are non negotiable, right.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh my gosh, we jumped in so quickly to the
fan theories. We've got to just say it plainly. We
mentioned pac Man, originally called puck Man, was made in
nineteen eighty. It was made by Namco, and it was
made in Japan. As you said, Nol, here's what's happening.
If you've never played pac Man. You control a guy
called pac Man who looks like an incomplete pizza pie.
(17:38):
You have to eat all these dots inside this maze,
and you have to avoid four differently colored ghosts. There
are larger flashing dots called power pellets, which caused the
ghost to be called vulnerable to pac Man's insatiable appetite.
At some point, turn blue, turn blue. Yeah, just so,
And now we go back to fan theories. I had
(18:01):
not heard this one. There's the idea that pac Man
is supposed to be an oyster taking back lost pearls
and that the ghost or jellyfish interesting. I mean, I
can see it. The art somewhat ambiguous.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I can see it too, But nah, I think they're
definitely ghosts.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
I think they're supposed to be ghost I think the
creators would have said they were supposed to be jellyfish.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
If that was the case. There's no other nautical themes
to it, and they could have accomplished that with the
resources they had in terms of the coding of it all,
but there's nothing else implying that. I think the absurdness
of it, the ridiculousness, if you will, is part and
parcel with the whole concept of pac Man. It's like,
what is this weird little round dude doing chasing around ghosts?
(18:52):
If it's not a metaphor for, you know, the futility
of the capitalist existence. I love the absurdity of it.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
I think the futility argument is probably the best so far.
We can move past some of the maritime stuff. We
can go even deeper and look at YouTubers Loxton and
Noggan in particular, they said, what about this, What if
the game pac Man is occurring on a microscopic level
(19:20):
inside the human body? What if pac Man is a
white blood cell that's trying to destroy germs aka the
pellets and protect the host against viruses the ghost see.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Now that would I'd be down with that if it
wasn't accomplished so well, no, maybe it's the inspiration because
Doctor Mario would have been much later. But that is
literally what Doctor Mario is about. You are throwing these
pills in and and you know, matching them up in
order to destroy these germs that stack up as the
you know, the tetrasy kind of puzzled window fills up
(19:56):
with pieces. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah. And then these YouTubers also say, well, the ghosts
do vanish when pac Man clears a level, which could
mean the cell is cleared of all germs and the
box in the middle maybe ground zero for the infection,
which is why these viruses the ghosts come back to
the source after pac Man eats them. I don't know
(20:20):
it's internally consistent. Let's say that because a lot of
these metaphors or these deeper analogies do explain everything that
happens in the game, right.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, at least we're talking about
the mechanics of it all. I would not say that.
I mean, aren't are there cut scenes in between clearing stages?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
You get a little dopamine hit for sure?
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Fair enough. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't
think they're going out of their way, at least in
the early iterations of pac Man to impart any like
particular lore from.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
The right exactly, not to go too dark. But it's
not as though you complete a level and then it
cuts to a pixelated picture of someone in a hospital
getting better.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
You know, that would be funny though, or yeah, dark,
maybe funny is the wrong word. They're getting better, they're
getting dark at all, Yeah Smith, let's talk about dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean it's amazing, No, not not not to be
a child, it's a it's it's the name that he
(21:26):
was blessed with, and I'm sure he wears it proudly.
Saturday Morning Breakfast cereals as well. Right, this was a
Gagga Day webcomic s NBC that started in two and
continues on to this day. Reimagine pac Man as a
horror story, much like There's an Incredible Weather Garfield. Garfield
as a Lovecraftian monster monstrosity, you know, absolutely terrorizing what's
(21:50):
his buddy's name, John Ody John. Yeah, I require Lasagna
John exactly. So they're doing something similar here with pac Man,
imagining it as a horror story. I mean, he is relentless.
I could see him instead of having the mouth flapping,
having like a knife and right, you know, so I
can see where they're going with this, where people in
this world exist only as giant mouth, which is a
(22:12):
bit love crafty and able to do nothing but consume
while being attacked by jealous mouthless ghosts who can no
longer eat their hungry ghosts.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, and I love that reference, and technically it would
be envious, but we're fun at parties, so let's keep going. Tarker,
there's an awesome graphic novel called Nameless that God that Speaks.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
This is unpleasant read, but very good.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Hey, what do you think happens at the end of Nameless?
Nol We haven't talked about this.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
I don't know if I need to reread it, but
I just remember it's definitely like seriously fed up, like
event Horizon level stuff in that particular book, like a
you know, space as portal to Hell again.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
A rollicking buddy comedy appropriate for all ages. Real swashbuckler,
A real swash buckler.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
It's kind of a rom com.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
We are lying, do not give that to your children
unless they are edgy teenagers. But we were bringing these up,
these references because there is another darker analog inspired by
pac Man. An artist named Travis Pitt had this just
fantastic artistic subversion of pac Man, depicting the entire lore
(23:35):
as a crew of astronauts sent to a research facility
where every one of them except for one guy, the
yellow suited guy, gets murdered, and our surviving astronaut, pac Man,
is then chased through the byzantine halls of the laboratory
of the spaceship and is being chased by the ghost
(23:59):
of his former fellow astronauts.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
People are really wanted. They're digging deep some of these,
That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Oh well, I think I think Travis here is not
saying that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
It said, another fun interpretation for sure. Yeah, there's definitely
different ways to slice it. I like it. I like
after the fact because that's the beauty of like open
ended art or art that allows you to insert your
own narrative into it and isn't so I mean, because
you know, let's be real, pac Man is a work
of art. It's really cool, the design of it, the
iconic ghost images, the color palettes, you know. I mean,
(24:34):
that's all there in that first game, in that simple design,
and it's like that alone. There hasn't really been there.
Certainly have been spinoffs of pac Man, and you can
play as pac Man in like Super Smash Brothers, and yeah,
there have been cartoons and all of that, but when
we think of pac Man, largely we think of this one.
We think of the old school, eating the pills, chasing
(24:56):
the ghosts. You know, original.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Speak of subversion. We subverted the order of the story
here because we're giving you the cool, deep, sometimes disturbing
philosophical interpretations. But we were telling you the truth at
the beginning, folks, as we reference Scott Pilgrim versus the World. Yes,
there is a true story about pac Man, who was
originally called puck Man, and it did come from the
(25:28):
name pacopacu or the phrase.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Meaning to gobble things up. And we thankfully saved this
for the end here there's another detail that led them
to calling it pac Man instead of puck Man. Think
about it, Think about some little naughty little scamps going
around with their sharpies and at the arcade, defacing the
side of these giant machines. It would be a very
(25:52):
simple maneuver to change that puck to you another a
naughty word.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah, they're not calling it puck fan, just so you know.
So that was that was the concern, and they change
it to pac Man because it sounded close to the
original Japanese name Pakuman, and the design, as we mentioned,
was conceptualized initially by Toru Iwatani. Tou Iwatani led the
(26:20):
team in nineteen seventy nine to create the game, and
Iwatani wanted it to have universal appeal to women and men,
and at the time that they were working on pac
Man or Pakuman, they were they saw a market opportunity
because a lot of contemporary games were based on war
(26:44):
or sports, which they saw as traditionally male interest.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
And I'm not trying to necessarily, you know, psychoanalyte that
was going on here, but it does occur to me
that those types of games that you're talking about, like
war games and drive games and more masculine games, because
of the technology of the time, they didn't look particularly immersive.
They it was a sort of like a video game
(27:09):
version of battleship. We're dealing with like a grid or
these tiny little icons and things that are sort of
representative of these sporting events or war. But a game
like this that purely creates its own world and sort
of defines the terms of what it's showing you, it's
a lot easier to become immersive, and I think that's
why the original design has stood the test of time. Originally,
(27:33):
this idea of a world occupied by these like moving mouths.
He saw a pizza pie Iwatanievic originally with a slice missing,
and that to him resembled an open mouth. And thinking
along the lines of like, what would be a simple,
easily communicatable, iconic image that could be communicated with the
(27:55):
limitations of this early video game, you know, programming in
pixel count.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, the fancy word for that is peridolia.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Paradolia, Yeah, where you see faces in weird such like
the backs of trucks, and you know, the hooks on
the wall look like a little drunken fighting squid.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
The reason cars have two headlights largely a face on
mars so on Iwatani is also saying, hey, this reminds
me of a word in Japanese language, or a character kuchi,
which means mouth. Ku Chi, we would spell it here
and says, look, the original Japanese character that means mouth
(28:34):
has a square shape, so why don't I just round
it out. And then to our earlier question about eyes,
he said, look, we could have put eyes on it,
but eventually we decided to keep it simple. And he
talks about this. He says, one lunchtime, I was quite
hungry and I ordered a whole pizza epic iwatani nice one,
(28:56):
and he says, I helped myself to a wedge and
what was left was the idea for the pac Man's shape.
So he steers away from sports themes or shooter games,
and he says, I want something non violent. I want
colorful characters with cheerful music. I want couples and families
(29:17):
to play games at the arcade together. This makes more money. Also,
I got a point out. I don't know about you guys,
but being an entity that can be given to anxiety,
I do find pac Man stressful, especially as you get
further in right and the ghosts get faster.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
All these games are so stressful. Mario Man I mean,
I guess Donkey Kong, but like all the old games,
the quarters eads are just so stressful quarter eaders.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
But the good news is this works for Iwatani and
the team, so much so that in nineteen eighty two,
just two years later, they create Miss pac Man as
a specific explain said thank you to female gamers for
their enthusiasm about pac Man, and they changed her name too.
(30:07):
She was going to be called pac Woman.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Mm, but instead she's miss right, isn't she miss or
she misses?
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Well, she's yeah, she's Miss pac Man.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
If you're nasty, oh fair enough. But is it the
implication that they're a couple.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah uh they they they originally
wanted to call her Miss pac Man, but they had
included a baby pac Man because why not, And so
they they didn't want to apply that she gave birth
out of wedlock, so they called her ms pac Man,
(30:44):
which I guess made it sound like they were married.
But here miss and Ms dot are the same thing,
so it'd have to be missus pac Man for us anyway,
lost to history. Originally, Miss pac Man was going to
be a redhead, but the guy who was in charge
of Namco at the time, Masaka Nakamura said, Nope, don't
(31:06):
make her a redhead. Give her a bow and give
her a Cindy Crawford esque beauty mark or Marilyn Monroe
esque beauty mark, whatever you wish, and so we said.
The work on this started in nineteen seventy nine. It
took a year and five months to make it. At
this point, this was the longest development time for a
video game ever. Butthesda, looking at you, where is the
(31:32):
Next Elder scrolls?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Probably five to ten years.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Jesus, some people, it's in.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
They have confirmed it's in. When they released the Oblivion
Remastered they confirmed that it's in production, which is I
guess new because it had been We don't even know
where it's set at technically yet.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Right, there are rumors, but also we're we're roasting with
a light roast and a lot of affections alike, roast
good things take time, right, uh so apparently the lighter
the roast, the more caffeine and the bean. That is correct, Yes, yes, yes,
here's the other idea.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but I'm here
for him. I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
I love a rhyme. So Awatani is honest about his inspirations.
He says the idea of pac Man consuming energy pellets
came to him from the video game based on Popeye
the Sailor Man. We get a boost after eating his
little pellet, his can spinach and spinach pellets.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
He fights to the finish, but he only ate you
only ever ate can spinach, right, which's weird because he
had he squeezed it out of the can and then
it just shot up in the air.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, Karkar Kherkar exactly. So the ghost, he further says,
came from his own personal admiration of Casper the friendly ghost.
And those fruit bonuses that get you more points were
surprise inspired by slot machines.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Slot machines, huh okay, Yeah, yeah, he's a man who's
lived a life, that's right. But also, like we know
that slot machines are so inherently designed to elicit those
dopamine hits. They're sort of the first to market with
that kind of stuff, so it definitely makes sense. Also,
the cherries and the bells and all the little icons
(33:26):
the slot machines show on those little revolving what do
you call them cylinders? I guess that was something that
also was able to be kind of co opted a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
One hundred percent. Yeah, And there's a funny anecdote about
Iwatani sitting together with the team that was doing sound
design and this guy, this absolute legend, sits down with
the sound designers and he has fruit with them and
he says, here's the sound pac Man should make. And
(33:56):
he noisily eats I think crutches, gurgles, and he's like, this.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Is this is This guy didn't have misophonius, I know, right,
got it.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah. One of the last things I want to mention
here as we're wrapping up, is that the concept of
artificial intelligence plays a big role in pac Man. The
ghosts are not steered by other players. Their movements are
described by their names exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
I've been itching to get to this. We've got a
shadow Blinky, who always chases pac Man. We've got Speedy
aka Pinky, who tries to get ahead of him. Each
of them have their own kind of like football players,
sort of flanking maneuvers, right, they're doing like plays, they're
sort of like trying to Yeah. I never really thought
about that, but it's true. They all do have their
(34:47):
own kind of set of moves. That's fascinating. We've got
bashful or Inky, who uses a more complicated strategy to
really hone in. Then we have Pokey or Clyde who
alternates between chasing him and running away. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah, And the Japanese names translate to chase, ambush, thickle
and playing dumb. Pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Super cool. I it never even occurred to me that
they all do different things, but they very much do. No,
it's immediately apparent now that I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Oh, and we do have to mention to the thing
about cutscenes. There are intermissions between levels. Now, they're not
that I.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Remember, Yeah, little bits, certainly not on the level of
what we think of today, but sort of like occupying
a similar space, creating a little bit of transition, maybe
a little bit of lore as to the interaction between
these characters.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Mm hmm. Yeah, And this is one of the first
games to deploy that strategy. All of the stuff we're
describing worked. Pac Man soon became a huge household name
on the level of Mickey Mouse. Like we said earlier,
he got his own Saturday Morning cartoon merchandise out the wazoo,
(35:59):
and we're PG thirteen show. But Pacman also got a
cover spread and a hustler Pacman Fox just saying there
was a cookbook released just this year, The Pacman The
Official Cookbook featuring amazing choppable recipes.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Heck yeah. And by the way, I found like a
sort of a collection on Pacman dot fandom dot com
of all of the cut scenes, and there are a ton,
and they all have our little skits basically between you know,
you start getting into the meet cute of Pacman and
Miss Pacman in Miss Pacman, of course, but you have
(36:44):
little funny interactions between the ghosts and uh and then
Pacman and Misspacman. And if you go to they're called
coffee breaks actually, so if you go to Pacman dot
fandom dot com slash wikislash Coffee Underscore break, you can
see a breakdown of what happens in each one of these.
And I would argue they are absolutely proto cutscenes.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, world building. We love to see it. We love
to see it here and everywhere else. We also can't
thank you enough for joining us today, folks, but here
we go. Thank you, thank you, yeah, thank you. Thanks
also to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Our research
associate for this. Andrea and who.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Else who else who wilse oh geez, Christopherracios. Name is
Jeff Coats here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the Quizzler, AJ Mohamas,
Jacobs the Puzzler.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Doctor Rachel Big Spinach, Lance the world's number one authority
on underwater explosions, and Noel.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Thanks to you, Ron, you as well, Buddy. We'll see
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for our favorite
video game ghost super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Walker walk a Max sorry teenage riot.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Oh that's a cut I wasn't expecting, but I love it.
That's Noel Brown. I'm ben bowling before we go.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, I'll tell you all that. Yeah, I've decided on
the next tattoo already.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh good.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, it's gonna be the third Empire symbol on the
inner bicep in.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
The at arm. You know, you know, I don't. Is
it Star Trek related.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It's Claire obscure related, older scrolls, elder scrolls. That's right, okay,
you know all right, And thank you for not saying
inner thigh, which I thought you were about to describe.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Look.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Uh, we have a great research brief from our pal
friend of the show and north star Andrea, who I
don't think has a ridiculous street name yet.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
No Andrea. The words the word carpenter, sharpentier.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Okay, I like a rhyme, you know, almost sucker for rhyme.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Nol. He had to, we had to do it to him,
or it might be pronounced sharpent a, in which case
she is the word carpenter.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
All right. Uh, and Andrea, as we know, is one
of our go to correspondence for all things pop culture, novels.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Nerd culture, gaming comics. He's particularly a fan of and
I would argue that this is a great intersection of
those because we've got a lot of graphic art components
to some of these early video games that become iconic
and that really leave an imprint on art moving forward,
like the Space Invader guy you know that does all
(02:20):
the tags. Those are basically little blinky characters from the
pac Man games. Because they didn't have that much to
work with, they had to do a lot with a
little and make these things eye catching. M M.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
One hundred percent. Yeah, And that's why a lot of
earlier video games are legendarily difficult because they couldn't make
the graphic super tasty, so don't had to make the
gameplay super difficult.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
It's true, for sure. And then move a little later,
we started to see smovie tie in video games that
actually had a little bit more of a look that
matched the games because in the early days Atari and stuff.
You had to really use your imagination and stretch it
to its bounds to make the cover art match anything remotely,
you know what the gameplay was. The et MA is
(03:11):
a perfect example. But apparently the Lion King video game
for Sega Genesis is an example of a game that
was so punishingly difficult. It was designed to get kids
to continuously rent the game from Blockbuster Video.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, and then we see another thing like, oh gosh,
what's a really difficult one? Captain Planet unfair because the
message was saving the world is hard, but they did it. Oh,
we're talking about a much more simplistic game today. We're
talking about pac Man. Who hasn't played it, who doesn't
(03:51):
enjoy it. It's not a huge commitment unless you're very
good at it. And it turns out, as Andrea taught
us recently, that pac has quite a complicated backstory. And
get this, it is forty five years old as of
May this year.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Only forty five. I know, I thought it would be older.
I thought it would be older too. That's just a
couple of years older than us. And Andrea did a
great job setting the tone for this episode, and this
brief with some still frame images from the Wonderful movie
based on a graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim versus the World,
and a lot of us who are familiar with this
(04:30):
might have gotten the most I guess relatively obscure. A
bit of backstory for pac Man from a scene with
Scott played by what's his face Michael Sarah where he's
trying to impress a girl and he asks her, did
you know that the original name for pac Man was
puck Mann.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Yeah, you would think it was because he looks like
a hockey puck, but it actually comes from the Japanese
phrase pacu paku, which means to one's mouth open and closed.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
It is funny because it's one of those chicken or
the egg things where it's like, if they had called
him puck Man, would history have just reflected that and
just we would just that would be what we would
think of puck Man? Or your immediate thought is no,
that's just wrong. That would have been bad and it
would have been a failure. I don't know if that's
true or not, but it is interesting pac Man. Something
(05:24):
about it just does have a little bit more of
a ring to it, and I love that it's associated
with that automnopeia of the sound of flapping one's mouth
open and closed, which in Japan certainly would have resonated.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
And it also brings us to an excellent segue into
the fan theory origin stories about the provenance of pac Man.
It turns out there's a lot of mythology surrounding the game,
the backstory of the man himself, the pac himself, and
other aspects of the world they build there. One of
(05:58):
our favorites is that both mister and Missus pac Man
are serial killers. This comes to us from The Daily
Show writer Dan McCoy.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
That's true. Well are they killers though, or are they
ghost hunters?
Speaker 1 (06:12):
So this is what Dan is pitching. While back he
went on Twitter, back when it was called Twitter, and
he said, guys, here's what I think. The pac Man
couple are serial killers, and they've been hiding their victims
under a maze, and the ghosts that are chasing them
are actually the spirits of their earlier victims, haunting them.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I appreciate what he's doing here. I appreciate the commitment
to the bit. I would argue that he is inserting
information that does not exist. I would say more likely
that pac Man and Miss pac Man are Ghostbuster type figures.
They're there to hoover up these spooky ghosts that are
out haunting the maze, which is, I guess, the world
(06:54):
in which they occupy. I do love this next point
that he makes though, which has always occurred to me
about this game and also Doctor Mario, where he's just
literally homeboys just chucking pills into the you know, the
puzzle window of the game. But yeah, we know pac
Man loves gobbling up these little pellets that a little
pill like themselves, aren't they.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, this one is uh, this one is more Internet
ephemera and we can't specifically trace it to Dan McCoy.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The idea is that, like you said, no, old pac
Man is eating too many pellets aka drugs, and he's hallucinating,
so he's seen ghost because he's a party too hard.
And the other one, the other related theory is that
pac Man is in a club having too good of
(07:46):
a time and then he bumps into a ghost.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah. Or another theory too, is that the creator of
pac Man, who has some addiction struggles himself, used this
as an elaborate metaphor of his time spent in rehab
being haunted by the ghosts of his addiction. I think
that's beautiful. I think it's a little unlikely, but you know,
maybe so man. Maybe it is like a total work
(08:11):
of art that is mirroring his struggle with pill addiction.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Or maybe it's fan fiction and there's nothing wrong with that.
We also want to shout out a Reddit user gm
Caros who does a little bit of multiversal world building.
It says that we all know the game Pong Pong
came out in nineteen seventy two, eight years before pac
Man came out in nineteen eighty, and gm Caro says,
(08:39):
what if some balls from Pong fell off the sides
of the.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Board, which they do if you miss deflecting them, where
do they go?
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Where do they go? Maybe they go on the pac
Man maze below, And maybe pac Man is our video
game Sissyphis and he just has to eat up these
lost balls forever.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Is he Sissyphis or is he the minota of the maize?
You know it? And he does have one eye? Does
he even have an eye?
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well, we are not the people to answer that question,
but it's also you know, it's a two D game,
right that doesn't have an eye in the original game.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
He's just a yellow cheese wheel with one section removed. Yeah,
it's just a cheese pizza with one slice taken. And
now we go to sid Lexia, writing in February of
two thousand and eight, who gets a bit nihilistically philosophical
about pac Man. Sorry, I'm playing a web based version
(09:38):
of pac Man real quick right now, just to remind myself. So,
the ghosts are sort of like held in the middle
until they're released, and then you have to turn when
they're blue. You can eat them only when they turn blue,
and all the while you're gobbling up pills, and then
you also want to get the little bright shiny pills.
That's what turns them blue. Sorry, y'all, just reminding everyone
(10:01):
of how pac Man works. It's a pretty complex mechanic
if you think about how simple the game is. And
I've never gotten past like, you know, three or four stages.
It's not easy for sure.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Again, if you can't make it pretty, you can't make
it easy. So going back to sid Lexia, who says
the following quote, thus far the twenty first century has
been a sort of an odd time for video games.
We've seem drastic increases in graphical presentation, and it's becoming
increasingly probable that video games will offer up environments that
(10:34):
are visually indistinguishable from the real world within my lifetime.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, we're still not quite there, but we're getting there.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Prescient and and sid Lexi points out the games are
becoming more realistic in other areas to using special controls
that get you know what it reminds me of. No,
Sid here is referencing we Sports and Guitar Hero, but
it reminds me of especially of things like Microsoft Simulator
(11:04):
Flight Simulator, which I, as you know, in a continuing
weird side mission, I play that simulator a lot.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
I know it's super cool man, and that's I mean
similar controls to the way you know, flight flighted vehicles
might operate to within other games Star Fucks and stuff
like that, right, m.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
And then we go into an earlier conversation we had
on stuff they don't want you to know about the
genre of things God.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
God, Yeah, fascinating, which would include technically things like the
sims where you're sort of this you know, all knowing
unseen hand sort of moving the inhabitants of this world
that you've created through the paces of their day to
day lives. These games don't really require super super, super
(11:52):
super intense in depth, you know, high level graphics, because
it's more about the interface they've designed, uh and the
largeness the scale of the world. You know. Another good
example of that would be something like Minecraft, which is
a modern example of you know, using limitations to your benefit.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Mm hmm, yeah, well said. We also see that, sid Lexia.
After pointing out these breakthroughs and the studying escalation and
sophistication of video game technology, Sid finds that only one
game has ever managed to really address the authentic simulation
(12:32):
of the real world, by which this writer means the
quote complete futility of human existence in the Western line.
We told you it would be nihilistic that game, says
Sid Is pac Man, and our author here goes into depth,
but I think we go with the recap and let's
(12:54):
just put on our philosophy hats and maybe round robin
this one.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Your individual life on this planet is completely insignificant, and
it is largely characterized by the grim capitalist system that
you were born into. You are doomed to a miserable existence,
which will be spent endlessly collecting brightly colored consumer oriented products.
You can attempt to alleviate your sorrow with needles or pills,
but such efforts will inevitably fail. Furthermore, you are predestined
(13:22):
to die, and you will probably not accomplish anything of
merit before this occurs. So I guess technically, games like
pac Man are what you would call today roguelike games,
where the deal is that you will inevitably die. There
is a you know, you want to push it as
far as you can go, you know, rack up as
(13:43):
many points, but the nature of the game is that
you are predestined for expiration.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
For failure again Sisaphian.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yeah, correct, just jump in here. Roguelike traditionally being that
it will always reset, you don't haveesothetically die. So for example,
like Blue Prince, which is a new puzzle rogue leg game,
you could win, but you can't just keep playing it.
We'll restart.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Okay, so it's no wait a minute, aren't there? But
aren't there? So you know what I mean? Technically, You
know a pac Man involves a dungeon. That pac Man
is a dungeon and crawl is it not? It kind
of very much, is yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And this is where they continue and say, so, now
that you know your life is pointless, you might as
well do what pac Man does. Go cry in the corner.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Ouch. Ouch. Shit. He does sort of cry at the end,
doesn't he. He's got little tears that squirt on out.
So when down the stown there. So, now that we've
wrapped our heads around what type of game this is
and sort of what came from it, it's true endless
(14:56):
cry in the Yes, it's this endless loop, right, That
is the nature of the pac Man game. It is
the Sisyphian struggle. So he's crying in the corner after
he you know, needs a little break from this endless
cycle of you know, absolutely defeated by life. So there
is a little trick, however, that he can employ when
a new level starts. Going back to the text, move
(15:18):
pac Man one space to the right and three spaces up,
then stop. The ghosts will leave him alone for about
fifteen minutes or so. It's true. This is wow. It's
a credit Nobo.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So say continues when your feeling like life is completely
hopeless and it is, disagree with it, find yourself a
cozy little corner to cry in. I can't guarantee that
your demons will leave you alone for at least fifteen minutes,
but you'll feel a lot better regardless. So now we're
going past philosophy into literature. Right at this point, this
(15:53):
is a weird meditation on pac Man.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I think this is fantastic and i'd see and I
see all of these parallels, whether there are intentional or not,
it absolutely holds, and I think it works beautifully.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, it squares with the reality of the game. And
before Lexia comes along, there's a publication called Trigger Happy
by Stephen Poole. It's a book entirely about video games,
and here pull kind of dovetails with the concepts later
proposed by Lexia. Because Poole says pac Man again, I
(16:28):
keep I introduced, and I keep using word Sisipian. But
pac Man is on this endless quest to become whole,
consumed by consumerism and therefore never achieving true satisfaction. Interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, no, it's mega interesting, Ben, And I mean also
considering the uh particulars of the Japanese rat race, you
know what I mean? Like it is, I can see
how this maybe even would have hit home on a
cultural line, you know over there, right, because I mean,
like we talk about salarymen literally passing out in subways
(17:05):
because they've had to drink their bosses under the table
as part of the sort of social contract of you know,
business life. These things are non negotiable, right.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Oh my gosh, we jumped in so quickly to the
fan theories. We've got to just say it plainly. We
mentioned pac Man, originally called puck Man, was made in
nineteen eighty. It was made by Namco, and it was
made in Japan. As you said, Nol, here's what's happening.
If you've never played pac Man. You control a guy
called pac Man who looks like an incomplete pizza pie.
(17:38):
You have to eat all these dots inside this maze,
and you have to avoid four differently colored ghosts. There
are larger flashing dots called power pellets, which caused the
ghost to be called vulnerable to pac Man's insatiable appetite.
At some point, turn blue, turn blue. Yeah, just so,
And now we go back to fan theories. I had
(18:01):
not heard this one. There's the idea that pac Man
is supposed to be an oyster taking back lost pearls
and that the ghost or jellyfish interesting. I mean, I
can see it. The art somewhat ambiguous.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I can see it too, But nah, I think they're
definitely ghosts.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
I think they're supposed to be ghost I think the
creators would have said they were supposed to be jellyfish.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
If that was the case. There's no other nautical themes
to it, and they could have accomplished that with the
resources they had in terms of the coding of it all,
but there's nothing else implying that. I think the absurdness
of it, the ridiculousness, if you will, is part and
parcel with the whole concept of pac Man. It's like,
what is this weird little round dude doing chasing around ghosts?
(18:52):
If it's not a metaphor for, you know, the futility
of the capitalist existence. I love the absurdity of it.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
I think the futility argument is probably the best so far.
We can move past some of the maritime stuff. We
can go even deeper and look at YouTubers Loxton and
Noggan in particular, they said, what about this, What if
the game pac Man is occurring on a microscopic level
(19:20):
inside the human body? What if pac Man is a
white blood cell that's trying to destroy germs aka the
pellets and protect the host against viruses the ghost see.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Now that would I'd be down with that if it
wasn't accomplished so well, no, maybe it's the inspiration because
Doctor Mario would have been much later. But that is
literally what Doctor Mario is about. You are throwing these
pills in and and you know, matching them up in
order to destroy these germs that stack up as the
you know, the tetrasy kind of puzzled window fills up
(19:56):
with pieces. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah. And then these YouTubers also say, well, the ghosts
do vanish when pac Man clears a level, which could
mean the cell is cleared of all germs and the
box in the middle maybe ground zero for the infection,
which is why these viruses the ghosts come back to
the source after pac Man eats them. I don't know
(20:20):
it's internally consistent. Let's say that because a lot of
these metaphors or these deeper analogies do explain everything that
happens in the game, right.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, at least we're talking about
the mechanics of it all. I would not say that.
I mean, aren't are there cut scenes in between clearing stages?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
You get a little dopamine hit for sure?
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Fair enough. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't
think they're going out of their way, at least in
the early iterations of pac Man to impart any like
particular lore from.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
The right exactly, not to go too dark. But it's
not as though you complete a level and then it
cuts to a pixelated picture of someone in a hospital
getting better.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
You know, that would be funny though, or yeah, dark,
maybe funny is the wrong word. They're getting better, they're
getting dark at all, Yeah Smith, let's talk about dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean it's amazing, No, not not not to be
a child, it's a it's it's the name that he
(21:26):
was blessed with, and I'm sure he wears it proudly.
Saturday Morning Breakfast cereals as well. Right, this was a
Gagga Day webcomic s NBC that started in two and
continues on to this day. Reimagine pac Man as a
horror story, much like There's an Incredible Weather Garfield. Garfield
as a Lovecraftian monster monstrosity, you know, absolutely terrorizing what's
(21:50):
his buddy's name, John Ody John. Yeah, I require Lasagna
John exactly. So they're doing something similar here with pac Man,
imagining it as a horror story. I mean, he is relentless.
I could see him instead of having the mouth flapping,
having like a knife and right, you know, so I
can see where they're going with this, where people in
this world exist only as giant mouth, which is a
(22:12):
bit love crafty and able to do nothing but consume
while being attacked by jealous mouthless ghosts who can no
longer eat their hungry ghosts.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, and I love that reference, and technically it would
be envious, but we're fun at parties, so let's keep going. Tarker,
there's an awesome graphic novel called Nameless that God that Speaks.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
This is unpleasant read, but very good.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Hey, what do you think happens at the end of Nameless?
Nol We haven't talked about this.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
I don't know if I need to reread it, but
I just remember it's definitely like seriously fed up, like
event Horizon level stuff in that particular book, like a
you know, space as portal to Hell again.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
A rollicking buddy comedy appropriate for all ages. Real swashbuckler,
A real swash buckler.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
It's kind of a rom com.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
We are lying, do not give that to your children
unless they are edgy teenagers. But we were bringing these up,
these references because there is another darker analog inspired by
pac Man. An artist named Travis Pitt had this just
fantastic artistic subversion of pac Man, depicting the entire lore
(23:35):
as a crew of astronauts sent to a research facility
where every one of them except for one guy, the
yellow suited guy, gets murdered, and our surviving astronaut, pac Man,
is then chased through the byzantine halls of the laboratory
of the spaceship and is being chased by the ghost
(23:59):
of his former fellow astronauts.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
People are really wanted. They're digging deep some of these,
That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Oh well, I think I think Travis here is not
saying that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
It said, another fun interpretation for sure. Yeah, there's definitely
different ways to slice it. I like it. I like
after the fact because that's the beauty of like open
ended art or art that allows you to insert your
own narrative into it and isn't so I mean, because
you know, let's be real, pac Man is a work
of art. It's really cool, the design of it, the
iconic ghost images, the color palettes, you know. I mean,
(24:34):
that's all there in that first game, in that simple design,
and it's like that alone. There hasn't really been there.
Certainly have been spinoffs of pac Man, and you can
play as pac Man in like Super Smash Brothers, and yeah,
there have been cartoons and all of that, but when
we think of pac Man, largely we think of this one.
We think of the old school, eating the pills, chasing
(24:56):
the ghosts. You know, original.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Speak of subversion. We subverted the order of the story
here because we're giving you the cool, deep, sometimes disturbing
philosophical interpretations. But we were telling you the truth at
the beginning, folks, as we reference Scott Pilgrim versus the World. Yes,
there is a true story about pac Man, who was
originally called puck Man, and it did come from the
(25:28):
name pacopacu or the phrase.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
Meaning to gobble things up. And we thankfully saved this
for the end here there's another detail that led them
to calling it pac Man instead of puck Man. Think
about it, Think about some little naughty little scamps going
around with their sharpies and at the arcade, defacing the
side of these giant machines. It would be a very
(25:52):
simple maneuver to change that puck to you another a
naughty word.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Yeah, they're not calling it puck fan, just so you know.
So that was that was the concern, and they change
it to pac Man because it sounded close to the
original Japanese name Pakuman, and the design, as we mentioned,
was conceptualized initially by Toru Iwatani. Tou Iwatani led the
(26:20):
team in nineteen seventy nine to create the game, and
Iwatani wanted it to have universal appeal to women and men,
and at the time that they were working on pac
Man or Pakuman, they were they saw a market opportunity
because a lot of contemporary games were based on war
(26:44):
or sports, which they saw as traditionally male interest.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
And I'm not trying to necessarily, you know, psychoanalyte that
was going on here, but it does occur to me
that those types of games that you're talking about, like
war games and drive games and more masculine games, because
of the technology of the time, they didn't look particularly immersive.
They it was a sort of like a video game
(27:09):
version of battleship. We're dealing with like a grid or
these tiny little icons and things that are sort of
representative of these sporting events or war. But a game
like this that purely creates its own world and sort
of defines the terms of what it's showing you, it's
a lot easier to become immersive, and I think that's
why the original design has stood the test of time. Originally,
(27:33):
this idea of a world occupied by these like moving mouths.
He saw a pizza pie Iwatanievic originally with a slice missing,
and that to him resembled an open mouth. And thinking
along the lines of like, what would be a simple,
easily communicatable, iconic image that could be communicated with the
(27:55):
limitations of this early video game, you know, programming in
pixel count.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, the fancy word for that is peridolia.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Paradolia, Yeah, where you see faces in weird such like
the backs of trucks, and you know, the hooks on
the wall look like a little drunken fighting squid.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
The reason cars have two headlights largely a face on
mars so on Iwatani is also saying, hey, this reminds
me of a word in Japanese language, or a character kuchi,
which means mouth. Ku Chi, we would spell it here
and says, look, the original Japanese character that means mouth
(28:34):
has a square shape, so why don't I just round
it out. And then to our earlier question about eyes,
he said, look, we could have put eyes on it,
but eventually we decided to keep it simple. And he
talks about this. He says, one lunchtime, I was quite
hungry and I ordered a whole pizza epic iwatani nice one,
(28:56):
and he says, I helped myself to a wedge and
what was left was the idea for the pac Man's shape.
So he steers away from sports themes or shooter games,
and he says, I want something non violent. I want
colorful characters with cheerful music. I want couples and families
(29:17):
to play games at the arcade together. This makes more money. Also,
I got a point out. I don't know about you guys,
but being an entity that can be given to anxiety,
I do find pac Man stressful, especially as you get
further in right and the ghosts get faster.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
All these games are so stressful. Mario Man I mean,
I guess Donkey Kong, but like all the old games,
the quarters eads are just so stressful quarter eaders.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
But the good news is this works for Iwatani and
the team, so much so that in nineteen eighty two,
just two years later, they create Miss pac Man as
a specific explain said thank you to female gamers for
their enthusiasm about pac Man, and they changed her name too.
(30:07):
She was going to be called pac Woman.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Mm, but instead she's miss right, isn't she miss or
she misses?
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Well, she's yeah, she's Miss pac Man.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
If you're nasty, oh fair enough. But is it the
implication that they're a couple.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah uh they they they originally
wanted to call her Miss pac Man, but they had
included a baby pac Man because why not, And so
they they didn't want to apply that she gave birth
out of wedlock, so they called her ms pac Man,
(30:44):
which I guess made it sound like they were married.
But here miss and Ms dot are the same thing,
so it'd have to be missus pac Man for us anyway,
lost to history. Originally, Miss pac Man was going to
be a redhead, but the guy who was in charge
of Namco at the time, Masaka Nakamura said, Nope, don't
(31:06):
make her a redhead. Give her a bow and give
her a Cindy Crawford esque beauty mark or Marilyn Monroe
esque beauty mark, whatever you wish, and so we said.
The work on this started in nineteen seventy nine. It
took a year and five months to make it. At
this point, this was the longest development time for a
video game ever. Butthesda, looking at you, where is the
(31:32):
Next Elder scrolls?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Probably five to ten years.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Jesus, some people, it's in.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
They have confirmed it's in. When they released the Oblivion
Remastered they confirmed that it's in production, which is I
guess new because it had been We don't even know
where it's set at technically yet.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Right, there are rumors, but also we're we're roasting with
a light roast and a lot of affections alike, roast
good things take time, right, uh so apparently the lighter
the roast, the more caffeine and the bean. That is correct, Yes, yes, yes,
here's the other idea.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but I'm here
for him. I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
I love a rhyme. So Awatani is honest about his inspirations.
He says the idea of pac Man consuming energy pellets
came to him from the video game based on Popeye
the Sailor Man. We get a boost after eating his
little pellet, his can spinach and spinach pellets.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
He fights to the finish, but he only ate you
only ever ate can spinach, right, which's weird because he
had he squeezed it out of the can and then
it just shot up in the air.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, Karkar Kherkar exactly. So the ghost, he further says,
came from his own personal admiration of Casper the friendly ghost.
And those fruit bonuses that get you more points were
surprise inspired by slot machines.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Slot machines, huh okay, Yeah, yeah, he's a man who's
lived a life, that's right. But also, like we know
that slot machines are so inherently designed to elicit those
dopamine hits. They're sort of the first to market with
that kind of stuff, so it definitely makes sense. Also,
the cherries and the bells and all the little icons
(33:26):
the slot machines show on those little revolving what do
you call them cylinders? I guess that was something that
also was able to be kind of co opted a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
One hundred percent. Yeah, And there's a funny anecdote about
Iwatani sitting together with the team that was doing sound
design and this guy, this absolute legend, sits down with
the sound designers and he has fruit with them and
he says, here's the sound pac Man should make. And
(33:56):
he noisily eats I think crutches, gurgles, and he's like, this.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Is this is This guy didn't have misophonius, I know, right,
got it.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah. One of the last things I want to mention
here as we're wrapping up, is that the concept of
artificial intelligence plays a big role in pac Man. The
ghosts are not steered by other players. Their movements are
described by their names exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
I've been itching to get to this. We've got a
shadow Blinky, who always chases pac Man. We've got Speedy
aka Pinky, who tries to get ahead of him. Each
of them have their own kind of like football players,
sort of flanking maneuvers, right, they're doing like plays, they're
sort of like trying to Yeah. I never really thought
about that, but it's true. They all do have their
(34:47):
own kind of set of moves. That's fascinating. We've got
bashful or Inky, who uses a more complicated strategy to
really hone in. Then we have Pokey or Clyde who
alternates between chasing him and running away. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Yeah, And the Japanese names translate to chase, ambush, thickle
and playing dumb. Pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Super cool. I it never even occurred to me that
they all do different things, but they very much do. No,
it's immediately apparent now that I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Oh, and we do have to mention to the thing
about cutscenes. There are intermissions between levels. Now, they're not
that I.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Remember, Yeah, little bits, certainly not on the level of
what we think of today, but sort of like occupying
a similar space, creating a little bit of transition, maybe
a little bit of lore as to the interaction between
these characters.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Mm hmm. Yeah, And this is one of the first
games to deploy that strategy. All of the stuff we're
describing worked. Pac Man soon became a huge household name
on the level of Mickey Mouse. Like we said earlier,
he got his own Saturday Morning cartoon merchandise out the wazoo,
(35:59):
and we're PG thirteen show. But Pacman also got a
cover spread and a hustler Pacman Fox just saying there
was a cookbook released just this year, The Pacman The
Official Cookbook featuring amazing choppable recipes.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Heck yeah. And by the way, I found like a
sort of a collection on Pacman dot fandom dot com
of all of the cut scenes, and there are a ton,
and they all have our little skits basically between you know,
you start getting into the meet cute of Pacman and
Miss Pacman in Miss Pacman, of course, but you have
(36:44):
little funny interactions between the ghosts and uh and then
Pacman and Misspacman. And if you go to they're called
coffee breaks actually, so if you go to Pacman dot
fandom dot com slash wikislash Coffee Underscore break, you can
see a breakdown of what happens in each one of these.
And I would argue they are absolutely proto cutscenes.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, world building. We love to see it. We love
to see it here and everywhere else. We also can't
thank you enough for joining us today, folks, but here
we go. Thank you, thank you, yeah, thank you. Thanks
also to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Our research
associate for this. Andrea and who.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Else who else who wilse oh geez, Christopherracios. Name is
Jeff Coats here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the Quizzler, AJ Mohamas,
Jacobs the Puzzler.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Doctor Rachel Big Spinach, Lance the world's number one authority
on underwater explosions, and Noel.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
Thanks to you, Ron, you as well, Buddy. We'll see
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History News
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