In 1983 an American magazine could still treat Pac-Man’s designer as a piece of trivia. “Trivia wizards will know that the man who invented Pac-Man is Toro [sic] Iwatani, an employee of Tokyo-based Namco,” Electronic Fun told its readers, and it hoped Namco would “soon send Iwatani to the U.S. so we can meet and get to know the man who made Pac-Man”. By then there were 100,000 Pac-Man machines in American arcades. Iwatani had set out to make something that women and couples would enjoy in arcades full of shooting games, and he built it around a single word: eat.
Fast facts
- Born: 1955, in Tokyo.
- Namco: joined in 1977; left in 2007.
- First games: the video pinball games Gee Bee (1978), Bomb Bee and Cutie Q.
- Best known for: Pac-Man (1980).
- Later games: Libble Rabble (1983), Pac-Land (1984) and Pac-Man Championship Edition, among others.
- Teaching: professor in the game department of Tokyo Polytechnic University’s Faculty of Arts, from 2007.
Video pinball
Iwatani joined Namco in 1977, shortly after leaving college. Edge reported that he wanted to design pinball tables, but Namco had moved “full steam into videogames”, so he compromised. His first games were video pinball: Gee Bee in 1978, then Bomb Bee and Cutie Q. Wireframe describes Gee Bee as the first game Namco developed internally, “a creative mix of Breakout and pinball”. Cutie Q already had the Japanese kawaii, or cute, style of drawing that he would use again.
Namco’s president, Masaya Nakamura, had his own ideas about who made good game designers. “For designing games, the knowledge acquired in school is not helpful,” he told the American children’s magazine Microkids in 1983. “I want people who think in unusual ways, whose curiosity runs away with them.” The magazine held up Iwatani as proof that it worked.
Pac-Man
In 1979 Iwatani decided to make what Edge called a “real” videogame. “Most arcade videogames of the time were violent and focused on the male player, so the game centres became places frequented mainly by men,” he said in 2010. “We decided to change that demographic by designing games that could appeal to women and thus to couples, therefore making game centres desirable places to go on a date.” “When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword.”
The shape came at lunch. “As I was eating pizza, I took a slice away and looked at what was left,” he told Edge in 1998. The name came from paku-paku, Japanese slang for a mouth opening and closing as it eats. The rest followed from the eating: “After that, I decided to add the element of four ghosts as enemies. Just moving around an open field would be too much freedom and no fun, so I set up a maze environment.” He made the whole game work from one joystick, so that “even girls who hadn’t played many arcade games could play and enjoy” it.
He kept the hero as plain as he could, “without any features such as eyes or limbs”, so that each player could imagine him. The ghosts mattered as much. “All of the ghosts have different AI algorithms that reflect their comical personalities,” he said. “It’s sort of like asking whether Tom or Jerry is the star of the Tom and Jerry cartoons.” If every ghost had chased Pac-Man the same way, they “would look like a string of beads. Where’s the thrill in that?” The power pellet, which lets Pac-Man turn and eat the ghosts, was not in the plan. “The inspiration for the power pellet was the spinach in the TV cartoon Popeye,” he told Retro Gamer. “The power pellets didn’t exist in the planning stages at all — they emerged during the development stage.” Ghost AI explains how the four ghosts choose their paths.
Pac-Man reached Japanese arcades in 1980, as Puck-Man. “In Japan, the game met with a lukewarm reception at first, but it then proved to be a long seller over several years,” Iwatani said. At the American trade show that November, the trade expected Namco’s Rally-X to be the hit. “Pac-Man was designed for people to play with ease and when relaxed without ‘excitement’,” he said. “I myself could not imagine that it would be loved by so many people and be such an international hit.” The Pac-Man entry tells the story of its success.
The $3,500 story
In Game Over (1993), David Sheff wrote that Nakamura “awarded the engineer who came up with the game a piddling $3,500”, and that the engineer, “disgusted”, left the video-game business. Sheff did not name him, and the second half of the story does not match Iwatani’s career: he stayed at Namco for more than 25 years after Pac-Man.
After Pac-Man
His next big idea was harder to play. Libble Rabble, in 1983, gave the player two joysticks, each steering one end of an elastic line to wrap around enemies. It was unpopular “because it was so hard to play”, he later admitted, but in the mid-1980s he still called it his best game. Wireframe also credits him with Namco’s racing game Pole Position. He worked on Pac-Land (1984), in which Pac-Man gained arms and legs and ran through a sideways-scrolling world, and on Pac-Mania (1987). Pac-Land was his favourite: “It pioneered action videogames in which the scene flows horizontally,” he told Retro Gamer, adding that Shigeru Miyamoto had said Super Mario Bros. was influenced by it. Retro Gamer also lists Ridge Racer and Time Crisis among the games he worked on in later years.
In 2006 he went back to his own maze. Pac-Man Championship Edition, for the Xbox 360’s download service, split the maze in half and turned the game into a race against the clock, with scores ranked online. “My aim with the game was to achieve legitimate evolution, with simplicity of game design and absence of the superfluous as my guiding principles,” he said, “because, in my opinion, few players look for complexity in gameplay.” Asked what he would change in the original, he said nothing: “Pac-Man is complete to such an extent that to add or to subtract anything at all would be unacceptable.”
Teaching
In 2007 Iwatani left Namco and became a professor at Tokyo Polytechnic University, in its Faculty of Arts, where a game department opened in 2010. In 2015 the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference (CEDEC) in Japan gave him a special award for Pac-Man, and in April 2016 he became president of the Digital Games Research Association of Japan. In 2005 Guinness World Records recognised Pac-Man as the most successful coin-operated arcade game, and in 2010 it recognised Iwatani as its creator. He also made a brief appearance in the 2015 film Pixels.
Sources
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 5, March 1983, p. 18: “The father of Pac-Man?”
- Microkids vol. 1 no. 1, December 1983, p. 11: Nakamura on hiring game designers, and Iwatani as his example.
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998: Iwatani joining Namco in 1977, wanting to make pinball tables, Gee Bee, Bomb Bee and Cutie Q, the 1979 decision, “taberu”.
- “A Question of Character”, Edge issue 65, December 1998, pp. 69–70: interview with Iwatani (the pizza, the ghosts and maze, one joystick, the simple character, Tom and Jerry).
- “When Videogames Ruled the World”, Edge issue 217, August 2010: Iwatani on arcades, women and couples, eating, kawaii and Cutie Q, Rally-X expected to be the hit, and his surprise at the game’s success.
- Craig Grannell, “The Making & Remaking of: Pac-Man”, Retro Gamer Collection vol. 4, 2010, pp. 27–31: paku-paku, the “string of beads”, Popeye and the power pellet, the lukewarm Japanese reception, Pac-Land and Pac-Mania, Ridge Racer and Time Crisis, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and why he would change nothing.
- Wireframe issue 27, November 2019, p. 52: Gee Bee (1978) as Namco’s first internally developed game.
- Wireframe issue 23, September 2019, pp. 48–49: Libble Rabble, its two joysticks, Iwatani’s comments on it, and his credit for Pole Position.
- David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999), p. 73: the $3,500 claim.
- Wikipedia, “Libble Rabble” (web, secondary): released in Japan in October 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libble_Rabble
- Satoshi Okubo, profile of Toru Iwatani, Nikkei xTECH, 5 December 2012 (web, secondary, in Japanese): professor at Tokyo Polytechnic University from 2007; the game department from 2010; the Guinness records of 2005 and 2010. https://xtech.nikkei.com/dm/article/COLUMN/20121126/252814/
- Tokyo Polytechnic University, news item, 28 August 2015 (web, secondary, in Japanese): CEDEC Awards 2015 special award. https://www.t-kougei.ac.jp/activity/archives/2015/article_47867.html
- Tokyo Polytechnic University, news item, 2016 (web, secondary, in Japanese): president of the Digital Games Research Association of Japan from 1 April 2016. https://www.t-kougei.ac.jp/activity/archives/2016/article_48522.html
- Wikipedia, “Toru Iwatani” (web, secondary): left Namco in March 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toru_Iwatani
- Serese, press release for an interview with Toru Iwatani, 10 March 2017 (web, secondary, in Japanese): birth year and place, Namco from 1977, the 2015 film Pixels. https://www.dreamnews.jp/press/0000148733/