An American-produced derivative titled Ms. This is not to mention the influx of unauthorized Pac-Man clones that took place soon after the original release, nor of the ill-fated port of the game for the Atari 2600 (which ironically was a contributing factor to the infamous 1983 video game crash in North America due to the debilitating technical limitations of the console). Pac-Man became one of few games to have been consistently published for over three decades, with many remakes and sequels released on numerous platforms. Pac-Man was determined to have the highest brand awareness of any video game character among American consumers. Finally, it opened gaming to female audiences, and it was gaming's first licensing success. It was the first video game to feature power-ups, and is often credited as the first game to feature cutscenes, albeit not to the degree that Nintendo's own revolutionary arcade game, Donkey Kong, had the following year. It introduced what is argued to be the first original gaming mascot, Pac-Man, and in doing so demonstrated the potential of characters in video games. It established the maze chase game genre, and is also credited for laying the foundations for the stealth genre due to its emphasis on avoiding enemies rather than fighting them. It quickly became far more popular than anything seen in the game industry up to that point, grossing over $1 billion in quarters within a decade, and towards the end of the 20th century, the game's total gross in quarters had been estimated at more than 10 billion quarters ($2.5 billion), making it the highest-grossing video game of all time. The character and the game itself were renamed Pac-Man for the North American release.ĭespite its initially lukewarm reception in Japan, it is difficult to overstate the impact of the North American release of the game Pac-Man. He therefore fashioned a game out of maze-like elements and a colourful aesthetic with cute character designs, including a player-character he originally named "Puck-man" after the Japanese phrase "paku paku", an onomatopoeia used to represent the sound of eating. A young Namco employee named Toru Iwatani designed the game with the intention to appeal to a wider audience beyond young boys and teenagers - demographics that were typical of the time because of the prevalence of space shooter-themed arcade machines. However, Namco's project in between, 1980's Pac-Man, would arguably become even more definitive of both the era and Namco's legacy. Galaxian revolutionized the arcade industry as the first game to use RGB-colour graphics, and it and its 1981 sequel Galaga became fixtures in what was subsequently remembered as the "Golden Age of arcade video games" - the peak era of arcade video game popularity and technological innovation. Following this, Namco developed and released the highly popular fixed shooter game Galaxian in 1979 to compete with Taito Corporation's successful earlier game, Space Invaders. seriesĪfter Masaya Nakamura's company, Nakamura Amusement-machine Manufacturing Company (or NAMCO), founded Namco's American subsidiary in order to license its video arcade machines to companies such as Atari and Midway Games for distribution in the U.S., Namco released its first internally designed video arcade game in 1978, Gee Bee.
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