His legacy continues on the latest generation platforms with ever-expanding adventures, and while they capture the good-natured quality of our little yellow hero, they can never outshine the accomplishment of the original games. While Pac-Man's popularity has died down these days (in comparison to the early Eighties), he is still a recognizable figure, and has appeared on just about every form of merchandising available. From that point onward, Pac-Man has gone on to grace just about every video game system that has ever been manufactured in some form or another, including the Wii Virtual Console. However, they did produce a far better conversion for their home computer systems and the Atari 5200 (if you can overlook the controls). Pac-mania became a phenomenon and video games' first mascot was met with an insatiable demand.Ītari snapped up the rights to bring the arcade hit home, and let down millions of fans with a sub-par conversion on what was their most popular home system at the time, the Atari 2600. Pac-Man's game play was a stark and refreshing contrast to the space aged shoot'em ups that were popular at the time. After being overlooked by 'experts' who judged Namco's own Rally-X to be the better of the two games, Pac-Man went on to unprecedented success and became an icon in Japan and in America.

It was designed by Toru Iwatani, who had previously designed the Gee Bee trilogy, and was the first Namco game to incorporate a four-way joystick. Inspired over a lunch of pizza, Pac-Man (originally entitled Puckman in Japanese) began life in the arcades in 1980.

Pac man 30th anniversary wikipedia