Secrets behind Pac-Man revealed. Nothing will be the same!!! - Polidicks

[quote]This not really a geek alert because who didn’t grow up playing Pac Man? Everybody did. 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. Here are the five most surprising: 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.) The missing puzzle piece Pac-Man was designed to be as simple as possible, to attract a wide audience. The limits of technology in 1980 made this a little easier to achieve. Iwatani says he’s happy about this now, but at the time, there was one more thing he wanted to add to the game. “I wanted to have a shelter and it would move up and down,” he says. “When the ghost comes, the ghost would be pinched by the shelter which would disfigure the ghost.” The ghosts were almost just one color It’s kind of hard to picture Pac-Man without the brightly colored ghosts today, but when the game was being developed, Iwatani says he was pressured hard to change that. The president of Namco ordered him to make the ghosts a single color – red, to be precise – since she believed players would be confused that some ghosts, perhaps, were Pac-Man’s ally. Iwatani refused the order and on questionnaires to the game’s testers, asked if they would prefer a single color ghost or four. Not a single person wanted the single-color option. That ultimately convinced the president she was wrong.[/quote] [url=http://vehemmag.com/2011/03/geek-alert-secrets-revealed-about-the-popular-game-pac-man/]Source[/url] I was only chased by one ghost all along?!? FFFFFFF-

This has been known for a long time, was even some crazy religious crap from it. I love how the names are Inky, Pinky, Blinky & Clyde.

The Pink ghost always killed me. I felt it was trying to insult me somehow. :frown:

Was quite an interesting read.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Huh. I'm gonna have to reschedule the game of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Manhattan]Pac-Manhattan[/url] I was planning to incorporate some of this news into the game.

I never knew that... Thanks for the read

[quote]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.)[/quote] [img]http://geekadelphia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ScottRamona.jpg[/img] What the puck that's actually true?

Knew the first two from documentaries/other stuff

[QUOTE=s0beit;28472589][img_thumb]http://geekadelphia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ScottRamona.jpg[/img_thumb] What the puck that's actually true?[/QUOTE] Yea. If you thought the video game references in scott pilgrim were fake, you dont know much about scott pilgrim.

I think most people realized that the only real threat was the red one. Still, pretty interesting stuff.

So Inky and Pinky secretly wanted Pac-Man to eat them? Bit of Foe Yay going on there, don't you think?

Makes me want to play Pac-Man now.

So in theory you could run as far as possible from the red one and be safe just for a while? Interesting.

I shall use this knowledge to conquer pac-man once and for all.

[QUOTE=Satane;28473681]lol, fuck man[/QUOTE] I was going to post that just now :argh:

I knew all of this before. Did not know [i]exactly[/i] how Pinky and Blinky behaved, but I already knew that Inky chased you and Clyde went at random. v:v:v

Billy Mitchell revealed all this in the 80s. None of it is news.

[QUOTE=Psychopath12;28473770]I knew all of this before. Did not know [i]exactly[/i] how Pinky and Blinky behaved, but I already knew that Inky chased you and Clyde went at random. v:v:v[/QUOTE] No, actually, if Pac-Man comes 8 tiles or less near Clyde, he tries to run away from you, but if PM is farther than 8 tiles away, he tries to chase you. I read something about this sometime ago, it has everything about pac-man game mechanics. It's on TVtropes, I think.

[quote] 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. [/quote] Western people tries to ruin everything :argh:

And I thought I was just insane...

So, the Puck Man is true, this is really awesome then.

Has anyone ever gotten to the "split screen" level before? [img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/Split_Screen_in_Pac_Man.gif[/img]

Uhm, this has been know for quite some time? [url]http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html[/url] Everything stands in here.

[QUOTE=B!N4RY;28475354]Has anyone ever gotten to the "split screen" level before? [img_thumb]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/Split_Screen_in_Pac_Man.gif[/img_thumb][/QUOTE] It's not really a split screen if it kills you instantly / freezes the game / [b]makes it unbeatable[/b] (what the arcade version does) Also, for the curious wondering why this happens: [quote]Pac-Man has a famous kill screen often referred to as the Pac-Man Bomb Screen. The game's level counter was a single 8-bit byte and could therefore store only 256 distinct values (0–255). Reaching the 256th level causes the counter that is used while drawing the fruit to overflow to zero, causing 256 fruits and seven blank spaces to be drawn. [/quote]

[QUOTE=leach139;28475485]It's not really a split screen if it kills you instantly / freezes the game / [b]makes it unbeatable[/b] (what the arcade version does) Also, for the curious wondering why this happens:[/QUOTE] What I meant was asking if anyone has made it far enough to see that level.

[QUOTE=B!N4RY;28475574]What I meant was asking if anyone has made it far enough to see that level.[/QUOTE] A certain man has gotten [i]the[/i] highest score possible in Pac-man. Killscreen and all.

[QUOTE=Psychopath12;28476055]A certain man has gotten [i]the[/i] highest score possible in Pac-man. Killscreen and all.[/QUOTE] Did that get him laid?

Yep, you got this article from Reddit.

All I have to say on this matter is: Fuck you, Blinky. Fuck you. :saddowns::arghfist: