'It's easy to understand and sit down and try to play. 'I think Pac-Man does very well on that metric,' Garriott said. He said that classic games like chess, checkers, and Go are all conceptually easy to understand, but take a lifetime to master. To Garriott, who in addition to being a famous game designer is also known for his recent trip to the International Space Station, one main reason that Pac-Man has held up so well over time is that the game's designer, Toru Iwatani, nailed what Garriott calls the 'fundamentals of game play.' You look at Pac-Man and you think it's such a simple game and an easy game to clone. 'It was really, really hard to get the game balance right, and get the of the ghosts right. 'It made me much more appreciative of the game,' he said. Meretzky recalled designing a title called Hodj 'n Podj, which featured several reworked classic games, including a remake of Pac-Man. Yet to designers like Meretzky, trying to replicate that was no easy task. Ultimately, it is Pac-Man's simplicity that brought it such a huge audience. Obtaining more than 5,000 points earns the player an extra life. Pac-Man starts the game with three lives, and loses a life each time a ghost touches Pac-Man.

In order to get a really high score, these items should not be missed. There are a variety of bonus items, including fruits like cherries and strawberries, the 'Galaxian' boss flagship, and a key. In each level, bonus items appear after a certain number of dots are eaten. Moreover, there are two warp tunnels on either side of the maze, which will slow down the ghosts while Pac-Man escapes to the other side of the screen. When a ghost is eaten, its eyes will return to the ghost home in the center of the maze, where it regenerates after a certain amount of time. The power pellet will provide Pac-Man with the ability to eat ghosts for a limited amount of time. 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.

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