December 1, 2022 – Pac-Man

Happy Throwback Thursday! Today we’re featuring the year 1980, the year Pac-Man came out! It was designed by a 24 year-old named Toru Iwatani for a Japanese video game developer, Namco. The Japanese video market was hugely popular, but Iwatani felt that arcade games only appealed to men with their crude graphics and violence. So he decided to create a non-violent, cheerful game that would appeal to women, because he thought attracting women and couples to arcades would make them appear more family-friendly. He started brainstorming things that women liked to do in their spare time, and settled on…eating. The game took a year and 5 months to complete, and they took great care to make it simple to play with cute, attractive character design. When it was released in the U.S., it was earning around $8.1 million per week. By 1982, it was estimated to have 30 million active players here in the U.S. Today, it remains one of the highest-grossing and best selling video games of all time. Learn more here.