But the blocky, charming aliens represented something new: recognizable characters, directly inspired by Japanese manga style. The Americans were edging towards abstraction, with games constructed out of ever-more elaborate arrangements of dots and lines. Simple and addictive, it was a masterpiece of engineering and design. It was kind of like Breakout, but instead of a paddle the player controlled a little cannon instead of bricks, the player fired shots at descending waves of alien creatures from which the game took its name: Space Invaders. In 1978, Taito released a game that totally upended the concept of what a video game could be. It’s also the moment when the young people of Japan first emerged as powerful consumers and coolfinders of new trends: imported rock and roll rebellion, coffeehouses, avant-garde films, cutting-edge manga-and video games.Ī rival company had already turned up the pressure. This was the era when Tokyo first took shape as the modern city we know today. By Iwatani’s high-school years in the late sixties, a nationwide student protest movement had sucked in virtually every young person into mass anti-war demonstrations, Iwatani included. Yet so too did society churn with dissatisfaction, as unpopular political decisions and labor policies infuriated growing numbers of citizens. Skyscrapers and superhighways and bullet-train lines were constructed at a breakneck pace as the economy grew by leaps and bounds, fueling the rise of a new middle class hungry for entertainment and escape. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics had finally put Japan back on the world map for something other than war and mayhem. (From Pac-Man to Batman.)īut where did this phenomenon come from? To Americans of the era, Pac-Man seemed to come out of left field, another wacky gadget from that country making stuff with silly names like “Hello Kitty” and “Walkman.” But there’s a longer and much more interesting story, one that intertwines cultural threads stretching across the Pacific for decades before the game’s actual creation.īorn in 1955, Toru Iwatani came of age during a period of turbulent change for Japan and the rest of the world. Even our digestive systems, in the form of Pac-Man cereal pitched by a prepubescent Christian Bale. Arcades, of course, but so too home consoles and cartoon shows and talk shows and toy stores and top 40 radio. And speaking as someone who was there, an 80s kid who caught the fever in real-time: Pac-Man was literally everywhere in the early 80s. In fact, he was the first pop-culture character to emerge from any video game. He was the industry’s first breakout star. Pac-Man fever swept the globe in a way no other video-game ever had. Namco founder Masaya Nakamura poses next to a Puck-Man machine at the company’s Tokyo office on November 6, 1982. The trademark sonic backdrop, generated by Pac-Man as he eats his way through the maze, is usually interpreted by Western ears as “wakka-wakka-wakka.” But it’s actually “paku-paku-paku.” Iwatani originally named his creation “Puck-Man,” based on the Japanese word paku, or “chomping,” the concept around which the entire game is based. Which is why I was honestly surprised when I saw how well it did in the United States and Europe.” “I didn’t think players overseas, who sought thrills and excitement from games, would like it. “The game didn’t really have anything in there that would leave a strong impression,” Iwatani told Kotaku via email this week, in advance of the anniversary. Its success took everyone by surprise-even its creator. Within a year of its American debut, importer Bally-Midway had sold 100,000 Pac-Man cabinets, and it was estimated that US gamers had dropped the equivalent of a billion dollars in quarters into their collective coin slots. But things played out differently abroad. Within several months, Namco would ship 15,000 Pac-Man units to Japanese arcades, a very respectable success for a domestic game. Its success didn’t register at first, because it was tapping in to a totally new audience for video games: women and children. At first it was only a modest success, failing to draw in as many 100-yen coins as Galaxian, the outer space shooting game that was then Namco’s top earner.
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