But the odd kiss and a pretzel won’t hurt us, either. Pac-Man is a sparky reminder of where women in video games have gone and where they still might go - ideally, beyond wives and sexy murderers since it isn’t 1982, and women now get to be picky about representation. Pac-Man sharing a kiss with her husband followed by Ms. It was just there, just the way it is in me and other players, celebrated with sweet screens of Ms. Pac-Man, womanhood wasn’t a joke or a gimmick. They also never belittled it or minimized the importance of these traditionally “feminine” roles. Pac-Man is a nuclear family wife - a homemaker with the occasional task of eating fruit and avoiding ghosts - but the original advertisements declaring her to be “the woman of the year” and “more than Pac-Man with a bow” never made this her sole focus. Pac-Man,” screams the Tumblr feminist in my head), but hear me out. I know this is debated (“she’s literally named Ms. Pac-Man allowed women to identify themselves with a character at a time where there were no other options, she’s also just a good character in a good game.Īt least, I think so. ![]() Pac-Man’s critical role in women’s video game history is well documented, and although it’s largely because Ms. Pac-Man today is viewed as the historical catalyst in attracting women to a traditionally male-dominated hobby.” 30th Anniversary of PAC-MAN More Doodles 30th Anniversary of PAC-MAN When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball. “Advertising flyers of the period depict only women playing the game, which reflected a broader acknowledgment of female participation in video gaming,” write history bloggers The History Bandits in a post describing how Ms. Especially since she was one of the first characters that drew women to gaming. It’s disappointing - I wish we had more years of Ms. At least much more often than her husband, who is pretty much always Pac-Man. Pac-Man has been missing from Pac-Man games or rebranded into other characters like Pac-Marie or Pepper. But royalties are the core of why, throughout the years, Ms. The decades-old saga finally ended in 2020, when Bandai Namco reached a settlement with AtGames, a company that bought the rights to Ms. Pac-Man, one of the world’s most successful arcade games, has been overshadowed by the legal troubles that followed it from the moment it was introduced as a knockoff “enhancement kit” for the original Pac-Man. Today, she celebrates her 40th anniversary.īut in some ways, Ms. She debuted in arcades across America and raked in $1.2 billion quarters by 1987, all the while managing her marriage with Pac-Man and their baby Junior, who was unceremoniously unleashed from his blue blanket during Ms. Pac-Man is a round yellow circle, kind of like a jawbreaker or the Sun. You know, without actually needing any quarters.Just like her husband Pac-Man, born just two years earlier (young couple!), Ms. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. ![]() They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. ![]() ![]() PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. To play the game, go to during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds. Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun. One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets and-of course-free games! When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician.
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