On October 10, 1980 we started playing Pac-Man and we haven’t stopped since. In fact, in Japan it was released a few months earlier, on May 22, in a cinema, but it was called Puck-Man, a name that made sense in Japanese but which in English risked being crippled into Fuck-Man.
The October 10 launch was in the United States by Midway which had struck a deal with the creators of Pac-Man, Namco, a company that had considerable success before getting lost in mergers and bankruptcies. In the early 1970s, the president of Namco, Masaya Nakamura, had created a small team with the task of developing video games, an industry that was still in its infancy. Back then there were only space invasions and games where you had to shoot. Namco’s initial goal was instead to develop a video game for everyone, and therefore also for women.
In fact, if you haven’t played it, it takes place in a labyrinth where a little man has to eat all the balls that I meet avoiding being intercepted by four ghosts in turn that can be eaten by Pac-Man for a few seconds but only after swallowing some balls that they give him special powers. Easy, fun, addictive, in the sense that it’s hard to quit. So much so that at certain times there was talk of Pac-Man mania and that it inspired many other video games (like Super Mario Bros). We talk about it again now: from 7 October an artbook of about 300 pages dedicated to one of the video games that made history was released for Panini Comics. One of its secrets was revealed by the creator, Toru Iwatani, who today teaches game theory at a university. Before attending a festival in Milan a few years ago, he told Jaime D’Alessandro, that inspiration came from seeing his pizza with a slice cut one night when he was dining alone.
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