A legends says that when the younger employee of Namca - Toru Iwatani - came up with Pac-Man he was holding a slice of pizza and the rest was staring him in this face. Iwatani later admitted that wasn't the case, he was just aiming to create friendly game with a protagonist for both boys and girls. And Pac-Man was created, running in maze from ghosts and eating little pills whilst doing that.
There really isn't that much more to Pac-Man, the only other choice was to eat one of the four big pills to temporarily gain the ability to eat the ghosts. And if we are talking about the first installment from 1980, there even was only one single maze available. Yet there are things that might surprise you about the game.
Did you know that each of the ghosts has it's own behavior? The red ghost is always trying to catch Pac-Man, the pink one is trying to get in front of him so he can cut of his retreat and the blue one is always thinking tactically based on where his "teammates" are.
The strategies were thus pretty complex and there is no wonder why there were a few maniacs who figured them out amount the more then 30 million players who played Pac-Man in 1982. And that brings us to the records. It is amazing but there are 6 players in the world who managed to play a perfect game of Pac-Man. That means that went through all the 255 levels, ate all the pills, fruit and even all possible ghosts and never lost a single life doing that. If you do that you will gather 3.333.360 points and the fastest ever to do this is David Race (what a fitting name) that managed to do it in less then 3 and half hours.
Pac-Man wasn't really a hit in Japan, but it immediately became a hit in the US, where it got also it's own song but even a tv-series. Just the amount of Pac-Man arcades is estimated to be more then 400 000. Another estimate is that more them 10 000 000 000 quarters have been used to play Pac-Man over the years meaning more then 2.5 billions of dollars have been spent playing Pac-Man.
Pac-Man is perhaps one of the few video games characters that even the people who don't play video games. Pac-Man, Mario and Zelda and maybe a few others are the ones in this exclusive club. And they will live on in our hearts forever.