Posts Tagged ‘Ms. Pac Man’

Pac-Man was designed to attract girls

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Wocka wocka!

(Yahoo.com) – Having been a part of the pop-culture landscape for over 30 years now, Pac-Man is a pretty familiar character.

He has adorned cereal boxes, been the star of a Saturday morning cartoon program and appeared on virtually every gaming platform to have ever been released.

That’s not just systems from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It also includes essentially every cell phone that has a screen, long-dead portable systems and plug-and-play devices for your TV. Along the way, the little pellet-muncher has built an empire that has allowed publisher Namco-Bandai to survive the worst the economy could throw at it.

But even the most well known icons have their secrets. 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.

The point of the game was to attract girls
While today’s player is slightly more likely to be male, gaming in the late 1970s was pretty much exclusively a men’s club. Iwatani wanted to change this, creating something that could appeal to both women and families, he says.

“The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers,” he says. “Back then, there were no home games. People had to go to the arcade center to play games. That was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.”

Each ghost had specific orders
When you play the game, it might seem as if the four ghosts are actively chasing you. That’s not exactly true. 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.

Instead, it’s only Blinky, the red ghost, who doggedly pursues you throughout the game. Pinky, the pink ghost (naturally), simply wants to position itself at a point that’s 32 pixels in front of Pac-Man’s mouth. The blue ghost, Inky, is seeking to position itself at a similar fixed spot. And Clyde, the orange ghost, moves completely at random.

Because 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.

What, exactly, does Pac-Man mean?
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.

“I thought about something that may attract girls,” says Iwatani. “Maybe boy stories or something to do with fashion. However, girls love to eat desserts. My wife often does! So the verb ‘eat’ gave me a hint to create this game.”

That theme continued with the game’s name. In Japanese, “puck puck” is akin to the U.S. saying “munch munch”. So the original name – Puck-Man – translated as “Munch man”. (A savvy Midway Games official changed it to Pac-Man when the game hit the U.S. to discourage vandals from shaving off part of the “P,” thereby creating an obscene word.)

[Full article at Yahoo.com]

Thursday Night is Gamer Night on Coin-Op TV

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Rob Welkner & Hailey Bright - Hosts of Coin-Op Tv Live

Rob Welkner & Hailey Bright - Hosts of Coin-Op Tv

Every Thursday night, we here in the Busygamer world turn off our Xboxes and fire up the desktops. Ironically, it’s not to hop onto a new MMO, but to check out what is happening in the world of gamer news and entertainment from our friends in Coin-Op TV land.

If you haven’t heard of this, let’s take the time to catch you up to speed. Coin-Op TV Live is an interactive live web TV show that features Hosts Rob Welkner, Busy Gamette Hailey Bright, TheStream.TV genius Brian Gramo, cool guests, and you.

Yeah you. Sitting there on your computer. The neatest feature of Coin-Op TV is that you have the option to log into the chatrooms and IM services and talk with other watchers and the hosts themselves.

Feel a little left out? Not to worry, you can catch archived shows on www.thestream.tv and if you even want to get more old school, you can now get Coin-Op TV’s “Best of” DVD’s. Volume 2 just hit this month. In honor of this, Coin-Op’s very own host/producer Rob Welkner took some time out to answer a few questions with us…

BG: How did the show start?
Rob:COIN-OP TV started in the summer of 2004. I was supposed to shoot a feature film and purchased camera equipment (Panasonic dvx100) and editing gear (Mac G5) to use for the movie. Unfortunately the money fell through and the people I was working with were complete flakes. I didn’t know what to do with all the gear I had but wanted to make something cheap that many people could see right away. I was a fan of shows on G4tv and the video game industry and had been going to E3 for a couple of years. It only seemed natural to start up a show about video games and talk about arcade and retro games. Back then everyone was still on dial-up modems and this was before the youtube boom. I did casting for a host and booked a trip to California Extreme in Aug 2004 where I met Walter Day and a ton of other good people willing to speak to me on camera.

BG: Has the show always been on thestream.tv?
Rob:COIN-OP TV existed years before TheStream.TV network was launched by its founder Brian Gramo. Brian and I actually met when I hired him to help me on a location shoot for the show. At this point I had posted over 40 episodes to the internet as a video podcast show. Brian saw there was a fan-base to what I was doing, so when he launched his own live/interactive network he invited me to participate. When COIN-OP TV LIVE started as a weekly show – it was the first time I was in front of the camera on a regular basis. TheStream.TV launched with a handful of shows and my show is the second longest running show on the network.

COIN-OP TV DVD Vol. 2

COIN-OP TV DVD Vol. 2

BG: How has the show changed since its creation?
Rob:So much has changed since I started. My original business cards read ‘web-tv show tribute to retro and arcade gaming’. In the beginning I was all about arcade, pinball and old school gaming related things. Who had the highest score in Ms. Pac-Man? Who could get to the kill screen in Donkey Kong? Who designed the Star Wars arcade game? These were people I wanted to meet and interview. As exciting as I found these people out to be – I started to notice that the general public wasn’t as interested as I was. So I had to find ways to add new dimensions to the show and open up the door a little wider. I started doing interviews at the ‘I am 8-bit’ art shows (a tribute show by artists to retro gaming) we started going to the Anime Expo and other shows looking for fun and interesting people to interview. I still have a great love for pinball and arcade and will continue to interview or showcase that sort of thing with COIN-OP TV but it has become a broader show over the years. Also the biggest difference is that the show is live and interactive running about 45 minutes rather then short isolated edited video podcast clips. We describe COIN-OP TV LIVE as an Internet TV show on the video game industry, people and events.
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