Its financial impact was staggering: it earned $1 billion in revenue in its first fifteen months in the United States, and the home console version was predicted in the pages of Time to be a bigger money-maker than Star Wars, a widely recycled factoid. But in North America, Pac-Man appealed widely to children and women in addition to male players, and to both more casual and more serious visitors to arcades. In Japan, it had been less popular than the contemporary Namco game Galaxian, the variation on Space Invaders. Upon its release stateside in October 1980, the game exceeded expectations. Originally in Japan the game was named Puck-Man but when Midway licensed the game to release it in the United States, it changed the name to Pac-Man to avoid any vulgar vandalism. It is named for the act of incessant eating. The name Pac-Man comes from the Japanese puku-puku, an onomatopoeia that references the sound of a mouth opening and closing. Many observers both in the ’80s and later on identified cuteness as one of Pac-Man’s key appeals, and cuteness has never been aligned with the dominant sensibility of teenage and young adult masculinity in the United States. In Japan, the game was not initially terribly popular, but it appealed, according to Iwatani, to “people who didn’t play games on a daily basis-women, children, the elderly.” As Tristan Donovan observes in his history of video games, Pac-Man draws on the Japanese concept of kawaii, often translated as cuteness, typified in global popular culture by Hello Kitty. Powering up the Pac-Man by eating an energizer pill was inspired by Popeye eating his spinach to gain the strength to defeat his foe Bluto. The ghosts were like Casper or Obake no Q-Taro. That’s where my idea came from.” The ghosts were inspired not by the sci-fi or space opera tropes of most popular games, but from anime and manga along with American children’s comics and cartoons. So I decided to theme the game around ‘eating’-after eating dinner, women like to have dessert.” He has often compared the form of Pac-Man to a pie with a missing wedge: “If you take a pizza and remove one piece, it looks like a mouth. In order to get women and couples into game rooms, Iwatani designed Pac-Man to have a specifically feminine draw: “When you think about things women like, you think about fashion, or fortune-telling, or food or dating boyfriends. The popular games at the time were all about shooting aliens, which was not perceived to be a theme that appealed to female players. Toru Iwatani, the young designer who created Pac-Man for Namco, has spoken repeatedly of his inspiration in making a game to appeal to women. Pac-Man would seem less likely than the space and war games to be corrupting the youth. While it may not have been anyone’s intention to make a more child-friendly game, Pac-Man also had the virtue of being cute and cartoonish rather than aggressive and violent just at the time when games were a cause for concern because of their focus on shooting and killing enemies.
Women or teenage girls were also regarded as a potential magnet for male customers, under the assumption that boys would follow where the girls are. A greater gender balance in arcades and other venues of public coin-op play would have the potential to change their reputation. It not only expanded their customer base, but also brought a measure of respectability to the business and medium of video games. Appealing to women had several virtues for game manufacturers, operators, and arcade proprietors. Pac-Man was designed to increase the market size for video games by appealing to women in particular, drawing them into the game rooms that had in some ways seemed forbidding to female players or to opposite sex couples. When Pac-Man was released in 1980 by Namco, a Japanese firm, video games had become well established as a profitable industry and a popular form of public and private amusement, but it was clear to all involved in the video games trade that young and male players were their main customers. Newman, associate professor and chair of Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies at UWM. One thing was clear: Video gaming was the province of young males. As this social history shows, parents, educators and even politicians struggled to determine whether the new entertainment medium was a boon or a menace. It’s difficult now to appreciate the impact the emergence of video games in 1972 had on American popular culture.
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