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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