![]() After being present with a 40 to 0 in favor of multicolored ghosts, Nakamura agreed to the decision. Although he was admittedly afraid of Nakamura, he conducted a survey with his colleagues that asked if they wanted single-colored enemies or multicolored enemies. Originally, all four of the ghosts were meant to be red instead of multicolored, as ordered by Namco president Masaya Nakamura - Iwatani was against the idea, as he wanted the ghosts to be distinguishable from one another. To prevent the game from becoming impossibly difficult or too boring to play, each of the ghosts were programmed to have their own distinct traits - the red ghost would directly chase Pac-Man, the pink and blue ghosts would position themselves in front of him, and the orange ghost would be random. Their simplistic design was also attributed to the limitations of the hardware at the time, only being able to display a certain amount of colors for a sprite. Iwatani cited Casper the Friendly Ghost or Little Ghost Q-Taro as inspiration for the ghosts. In turn, he made the in-game characters cute and colorful, a trait borrowed from Iwatani's previous game Cutie Q (1979), which featured similar "kawaii" characters. The idea for the ghosts was made from Iwatani's desire to create a video game that could attract women and younger players, particularly couples, at a time where most video games were "war"-type games or Space Invaders clones. That ultimately convinced the president she was wrong.The ghosts were created by Toru Iwatani, who was the head designer for the original Pac-Man arcade game. Not a single person wanted the single-color option. Iwatani refused the order and on questionnaires to the game’s testers, asked if they would prefer a single color ghost or four. The president of Namco ordered him to make the ghosts a single color - red, to be precise - since she believed players would be confused that some ghosts, perhaps, were Pac-Man’s ally. It’s kind of hard to picture Pac-Man without the brightly colored ghosts today, but when the game was being developed, Iwatani says he was pressured hard to change that. “When the ghost comes, the ghost would be pinched by the shelter which would disfigure the ghost.” “I wanted to have a shelter and it would move up and down,” he says. Iwatani says he’s happy about this now, but at the time there was one more thing he wanted to add to the game. The limits of technology in 1980 made this a little easier to achieve. Pac-Man was designed to be as simple as possible, to attract a wide audience. to discourage vandals from shaving off part of the “P,” thereby creating an obscene word.) saying “munch munch.” So the original name - Puck-Man - translated as “Munch man.” (A savvy Midway Games official changed it to Pac-Man when the game hit the U.S. In Japanese, “puck puck” is akin to the U.S. That theme continued with the game’s name. My wife often does! So the verb ‘eat’ gave me a hint to create this game.” “Maybe boy stories or something to do with fashion. “I thought about something that may attract girls,” says Iwatani. You may have heard the story about how a pizza with a missing slice inspired Pac-Man’s design, but it turns out the game was designed entirely around food. And Clyde, the orange ghost, moves completely at random.īecause the player constantly has Pac-Man on the go, however, the ghosts are always changing direction and trying to achieve their goal, which adds to the challenge of the game. The blue ghost, Inky, is seeking to position itself at a similar fixed spot. Pinky, the pink ghost (naturally), simply wants to position itself at a point that’s 32 pixels in front of Pac-Man’s mouth. Instead, it’s only Blinky, the red ghost, who doggedly pursues you throughout the game. Iwatani intentionally avoided programming them with that purpose, since that would have resulted in Pac-Man zipping around the screen with four ghosts always right behind him. When you play the game, it might seem as if the four ghosts are actively chasing you. So we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.” People had to go to the arcade center to play games. ![]() “The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers,” he says. Iwatani wanted to change this, creating something that could appeal to both women and families, he says. ![]() While today’s player is slightly more likely to be male, gaming in the late 1970s was pretty much exclusively a men’s club. ![]() The point of the game was to attract girls. This week, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Toru Iwatani, creator of the game, offered a postmortem on the industry’s biggest franchise - and told a few tales most fans have probably never heard. But even the most well known icons have their secrets.
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