Who Created Pac-Man? The Toru Iwatani Story
Pac-Man was created by Toru Iwatani, a 24-year-old designer at Namco. Development took about 17 months and the team had fewer than ten people. The game launched in Japan in May 1980 as 'Puck Man' and was renamed Pac-Man for the US release later that year.
The designer's brief
Iwatani has said in interviews that he was specifically trying to design a game that would appeal to women and couples. Japanese arcades in the late 1970s were dominated by young men playing space shooters, and Namco's leadership saw the market as artificially narrow.
His design priorities were a non-violent goal (eating, not shooting), an approachable protagonist, a single-screen maze that didn't need instructions, and four enemies with distinct personalities so the game felt social rather than mechanical.
The pizza inspiration (mostly a myth)
You've probably heard the story: Iwatani was eating pizza, picked up a slice, looked at the remaining shape, and was inspired. The reality is messier. In multiple interviews Iwatani has said the pizza was one of several inspirations. The Japanese mouth-shape character 'kuchi' (口) and the onomatopoeia 'paku paku' (the sound of repeated chewing) were equally important — the original Japanese name 'PUCK MAN' came from 'paku paku.'
Why the name changed
The Japanese release was called Puck Man. For the US release, Bally/Midway worried that arcade vandals would scratch the P off the cabinet to make it read something else. They changed the name to Pac-Man. The change stuck.
After the launch
The Japanese reception was modest. The US release in October 1980 was explosive. By 1981 Pac-Man was generating an estimated $1 billion per year in quarters in the US alone. Iwatani became one of the few Japanese game designers to achieve international name recognition.
He stayed at Namco for decades, returning in 2007 to design Pac-Man Championship Edition, generally considered the best Pac-Man game since the 1980 original.
Where to play his design
Try the closest browser version of the 1980 arcade game on Classic Pac, or read the full history of Pac-Man for the post-1980 story.
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