Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man[a] in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and published by Namco for arcades.

The objective of the game is to eat all of the dots placed in the maze while avoiding four colored ghosts—Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (cyan), and Clyde (orange)—who pursue Pac-Man.

The game increases in difficulty as the player progresses: the ghosts become faster, and the energizers' effect decreases in duration, eventually disappearing entirely.

[26] Iwatani enlisted the help of nine other Namco employees to assist in production, including composer Toshio Kai, programmer Shigeo Funaki, and hardware engineer Shigeichi Ishimura.

[27] Care was taken to make the game appeal to a "non-violent" audience, particularly women, with its usage of simple gameplay and cute, attractive character designs.

[26] Frank Fogleman, the co-founder of Gremlin Industries, believes that the maze-chase gameplay of Pac-Man was inspired by Sega's Head On (1979), a similar arcade game that was popular in Japan.

[26] (The ghosts' Japanese names are おいかけ, chase; まちぶせ, ambush; きまぐれ, fickle; and おとぼけ, playing dumb, respectively.)

[22] In a design session, Iwatani noisily ate fruit and made gurgling noises to describe to Kai how he wanted the eating effect to sound.

[12][33] Masaya Nakamura chose to rename it to Pac-Man, as he felt it was closer to the game's original Japanese title of Pakkuman.

[40] Pac-Man was ported to several home video game systems and personal computers; the most infamous of these is the 1982 Atari 2600 conversion, designed by Tod Frye and published by Atari, Inc.[41] This version of the game was widely criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of the arcade version and for its peculiar design choices, most notably the flickering effect of the ghosts.

[47] The Famicom version was later released in North America for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari Games.

[48] The same year, Namco and SNK co-published a port for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which came with a circular "Cross Ring" that attached to the d-pad to restrict it to four-directional movement.

[92][93] It overtook Atari's Asteroids (1979) as the best-selling arcade game in the country,[94] and surpassed the film Star Wars (1977) with more than $1 billion in revenue.

[125] It is often cited as the first game with cutscenes (in the form of brief comical interludes about Pac-Man and Blinky chasing each other),[131]: 2  though actually Space Invaders Part II employed a similar style of between-level intermissions in 1979.

[133] Pac-Man was one of the first popular non-shooting action games, defining key elements of the genre such as "parallel visual processing" which requires simultaneously keeping track of multiple entities, including the player's location, the enemies, and the energizers.

In both cases the reviewer felt that the joystick controls were harder to use than those of the arcade machine, and that "attempts to make quick turns are often frustrated".

[149][150] The game's popularity has led to "Pac-Man" being adopted as a nickname, such as by boxer Manny Pacquiao[151] and the American football player Adam Jones.

This included its house blend coffee (Clyde's Coffee Blend), two Slurpee flavors (Blinky's Cherry & Inky's Blueberry Raz), and a special limited time only cappuccino flavor (Pinky's Strawberry White Chocolate Cappuccino), the latter of which came out pink to match the ghost.

[158][159] The original Pac-Man game plays a key role in the plot of Ernest Cline's video game-themed science fiction novel Ready Player One.

[167] The Pac-Man character appears in the film Pixels (2015), with Denis Akiyama playing series creator Toru Iwatani.

The 2018 film Relaxer uses Pac-Man as a strong plot element in the story of a 1999 couch-bound man who attempts to beat the game (and encounters the famous Level 256 glitch) before the year 2000 problem occurs.

[182] Players move up to four Pac-Man characters (traditional yellow plus red, green, and blue) plus two ghosts as per the throws of a pair of dice.

[184] A perfect score on the original Pac-Man arcade game is 3,333,360 points, achieved when the player obtains the maximum score on the first 255 levels by eating every dot, energizer, fruit and blue ghost without losing a life, then uses all six lives to obtain the maximum possible number of points on level 256.

[185][186] The first person to achieve a publicly witnessed and verified perfect score without manipulating the game's hardware to freeze play was Billy Mitchell, who performed the feat on July 3, 1999.

[189] The world record for the fastest completion of a perfect score, according to Twin Galaxies, is held by David Race with a time of 3 hours, 28 minutes, 49 seconds.

[190][191] In December 1982, eight-year-old boy Jeffrey R. Yee received a letter from United States president Ronald Reagan congratulating him on a world record score of 6,131,940 points, possible only if he had passed level 256.

[186] In September 1983, Walter Day, chief scorekeeper at Twin Galaxies at the time, took the U.S. National Video Game Team on a tour of the East Coast to visit gamers who claimed the ability to pass that level.

[186] After announcing in 2018 that it would no longer recognize the first perfect score on Pac-Man, Guinness World Records reversed that decision and reinstated Billy Mitchell's 1999 performance on June 18, 2020.

The character's gender was changed to female in response to Pac-Man's popularity with women, with new mazes, moving bonus items, and faster gameplay being implemented to increase its appeal.

There were two custom chips on the board: the 285 sync bus controller and the 284 video RAM addresser, but daughterboards made only from standard parts were also widely used instead.