Why is pacman popular

The year was , when cool kids with a few quarters hung out at the arcade. Elouise Oyzon was in high school and not really into video games, because they were all a bit dark and violent like Space Invaders, where the player shoots at aliens. The game, from Bandai Namco Entertainment in Japan, had a fun concept with a bold design. And it had great music. According to NPD Group, spending on video games reached a record high in the first quarter of , as people began spending more time at home because of the coronavirus.

And modern games owe a lot to arcade classics like Pac-Man. Forty years ago, most arcade games were marketed to boys. So he dreamed up something everyone could relate to. General Mills made Pac-Man cereal.

Today, nostalgia for the game is strong. His influence on pop culture is vast and there is a weird association between Pac-Man and Christmas. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.

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Updated on June 06, Tweet Share Email. In This Article. Here was a game that was none of those things. There was no weapon to fire. It was: Outrun your pursuers until you are of sufficient strength that you can then chase them. And what it really wound up doing was it changed the social dialogue around arcades. Now, for the first time, you had women in arcades, and you had kids—both boys and girls—in these arcades that were typically full of older teens and adult males.

It fundamentally changed the dialogue and the social contract that arcades had made. It made it more permissible for everyone to be included in arcade culture. It was one of those games, and there are games in each generation that kind of do the same thing, but it was one of the very first that changed the way, in a very broad sense, that both society and game designers thought about video games.

It was so different. Here was this abstract, candy-colored game that spoke to both men and women equally, and it influenced games that came out after, like Pengo, a game about a cute little penguin that ran around and pushed its enemies away with blocks. You see it changed how developers thought about games. It was an incredible force in the maturing of the video game industry. Pac-Man prompted designers to experiment with a broader range of characters, environments, and stories in their games.

I mentioned Pengo from Sega as another game released during the same era. A cartoon penguin, amorphous blobs as enemies, simple interstitial animations between levels, wicked game play mechanics, all of these things were borne out of the design influence that Pac-Man had on the industry. And look at what followed: Mr. Do, Dig-Dug, Ms. Pac-Man, Tutankham, etc.

All games that came after Pac-Man that had an iconic mascot that was central to the game. But Pac-Man was the first.