Tokyo (AFP)
Forty years ago a new game appeared in Tokyo, featuring a big yellow chick camembert leading wild chases with ghosts in a labyrinth: Pac-Man was born, and it was going to become the most famous arcade game.
The goal of the game, very simple: to swallow the gluttonous Pac-Man all the pills of the maze, and fruits from time to time to glean additional points, all while escaping the ghosts, which become faster and faster over the levels.
The greatest pleasure of the players being to be able to persecute and eat the ghosts in their turn, for a few seconds, as soon as Pac-Man swallows one of the magic pills located in the recesses of the labyrinth.
The game was originally called "Puck-Man", after a play on words with "paku", which means "to gobble" or "to swallow up" in Japanese.
But the game was renamed Pac-Man when it was launched in the United States, for fear that players would have fun replacing the initial "P" with an "F" ...
The game's creator, Toru Iwatani, got the idea for the Pac-Man shape by taking a small slice of pizza, and realizing that the rest of the dish looked like a head with a wide open mouth.
Originally Pac-Man was a game for women and couples - a different audience than that, usually male, fond of shooting games on aliens like Space Invaders, which were all the rage in Japan at the time, said M Iwatani in an interview with Wired magazine published in 2010.
The very first game machine had been installed in a cinema in the trendy Tokyo district of Shibuya, rather than in an arcade room with violent games. And the success was immediate, according to Mr. Iwatani.
- Popeye, another source of inspiration -
As for his idea of being able to make Pac-Man go from hunted to hunter, it came from the character of American "comic" and cartoon Popeye, the sailor whose forces multiply as soon as he swallows a box of spinach.
Creation of the Japanese video game publisher Namco, which merged in 2005 with its rival Bandai, Pac-Man was subsequently transposed to all video game media, from consoles to PCs and smartphones.
It has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the most popular arcade game of all time.
The game has become a lucrative franchise for its publishers, with many variations such as "Ms. Pac-Man", "Pac-Panic" (or Pac-Attack), "Pac-in-Time" or even "Pac 'n Roll ".
Bandai Namco says that the Pac-Man brand is "one of the best known in the world", with a brand awareness rate of 90%.
In 2010, for the 30th anniversary of the original game, Google had offered internet users unlimited parts of Pac-Man on its home page in place of the usual logo of its search engine: the first playable "Doodle" from Google.
Subsequently, the geolocation site Google Maps had also transformed its maps into a giant Pac-Man game.
According to Wired magazine, the highest possible score for the game is 3,333,360 points, at the end of the 256th and last level. Provided you have never been devoured once by the ghosts and have eaten all the pastilles, fruits and ghosts possible.
Friday, for the 40th anniversary of the game, a hashtag dedicated to the event was playing on Twitter in Japan, picked up by fans.
"The characters are so colorful and cute. I remember I used to play them a lot with my parents. Happy birthday Pac-Man!" Wrote a Japanese user of the social network.
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