Pac-Man Creator Oral History: How One of the World's Most Popular Games Was Created

Leifeng.com: Pac-Man is one of the most popular video games in history. On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, the game creators tell the story behind this most popular game in American history, published by FastCompany and compiled by Leifeng.com.

Thirty-five years after its first release, Ms. Pac-Man remains one of the most successful and long-running games of all time. Pac-Man made its public debut in its original form at Bally Midway on February 3, 1982, and has since gone on to have at least 28 versions across different gaming and computer platforms.

Today, the "First Lady of Video Games" (as it was dubbed in 1982) is still ubiquitous, and can still be found in restaurants, public lounges, arcades, and other venues across the U.S. In fact, with 117,000 units sold in the U.S. (more if you include the recent re-releases bundled with other games), Pac-Man still holds the record for standalone video game sales in the U.S. (with Pac-Man, its consort, being a close second.)

Despite its astonishing success, few people know that this classic video game wasn’t developed by Japan’s Namco (the company behind Pac-Man). In fact, it was created by a group of MIT dropouts from New England. With a keen business sense and perfect teamwork, they sold their idea and theory to Midway, and the game quickly became a hit and broke records.

In 2011, I had an in-depth conversation with the three main creators of Pac-Man about their plans for the upcoming 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. Although this has been reported elsewhere, I found that there was still a lot of valuable information waiting to be discovered in my interview.

For this oral history, we will record their stories in full and edit them to make them more coherent and clear. The location is New England, not Silicon Valley or Japan. They are myths, legends, creative and bold, they are a group of geniuses who happened to meet and collide with sparks.

The founders met at MIT and dropped out together

Pac-Man was officially released in early 1982, setting off a video game craze in the United States. The concept of this new coin-operated game soon permeated consoles and home computers, and for less advanced families it was advertised as "video game realism", as if it had reached the pinnacle of the gaming world.

It was this group of MIT students who first dabbled in video games as a part-time gig in the late 1970s that made coin-operated video games a staple of gaming culture.

Steve Golson, former engineer at General Computer Corporation: I moved into a dorm at MIT in 1976, and the next year Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran moved into my suite as freshmen. That's how we met.

Doug Macrae, co-founder and former chairman of General Computer Corporation: I entered MIT in 1977. I did my bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering, economics, and architecture. I was supposed to finish my thesis in the spring of 1981, but I never started writing it. Instead, I started working on Pac-Man.

Golson: There was a local guy in our dorm who played pinball. He was terrible at it, and he quickly fell out of love with it. Doug’s brother had an old copy of the game—Gottlieb Pioneer—and we were having a party soon, but we didn’t have a pinball game. Doug said, “That’s fine, I can just bring my brother’s over.”

One day Doug and Kevin were playing games and suddenly they said, "Hey, maybe we can do this and start a business!"

Macrae: Kevin Curran and I worked out the original game framework at school.

Golson: They got together and bought a new pinball game and put it in the dorm. Then they bought another one. I started helping them run their game in the dorm very early on.

Macrae and Curran's game plan quickly expanded to three dormitories, so they had to consider not only their own interests, but also the interests of their classmates. For these goals, they used those machines to try to make money, but their income soon declined because people began to master the essentials of the game and were no longer obsessed with it. As game operators, they themselves had to make money, which drove them to make more interesting games. So they did what any MIT student would do in this situation: consider mathematical precision. Soon, Atari was attracted by their Missile Command and made it one of the most popular games in the early 1980s.

Macrae: When we first started, we were making about $600 a week in school for Missile Command. We figured that a session was three minutes long, 17 hours a day. The question was, if the session was longer than three minutes, the number of sessions would decrease, or if people were less addicted to it, the number of hours a day would decrease, and people would no longer be so excited to line up to play, so the number of sessions would decrease.

We try to control the game time as much as possible, because if people are good at playing, the game time will definitely be longer, but we also want everyone to be enthusiastic, so that people will come to play more. So we try to control the number of game sessions in various ways.

Golson: In video games, there are kits called speed-up kits or boost kits that are sold directly to arcade owners. Our first successful game was Asteroids, and because people knew how to do it, they could get through a certain level in the game. So someone designed some levels for the game, and wow, it made the game harder and more interesting.

Doug and Kevin also started designing enhancements for Missile Command, but no one had come up with one. The technical complexity of programming this game was much, much greater than other games. You had to understand how it was programmed. Doug and Kevin said, "Well, let's go to MIT. I bet we can figure it out."

Macrae: We came up with a power-up kit for Missile Command called Super Missile Attack, and it was very successful—at least for college students. We sold 1,000 kits, and the profit on each kit was about $250, so we made $250,000 while we were in college. Super Missile Attack made the game more interesting and more challenging, and it fixed a lot of the shortcomings of the game.

Adjusting for inflation, $250,000 in 1981 is roughly equivalent to $663,000 today. Macrae and Curran created a company called General Computer Corporation (GCC) to consolidate the business and achieve new success. Lacking capital to pay engineering salaries, they adopted a profit-sharing system to benefit the employees who worked for this small company.

Macrae: Kevin and I are the founders and owners of our company. John Tylko is primarily a business partner, and he has no programming experience. The other three people, Mike Horowitz, Chris Rode, and Steve Golson, are engineers. Kevin and I are equal partners, and the other four share the profits.

Golson: I met them in the spring of 1981, when they decided to start this company. Doug and Kevin had moved off campus with a few other students. They rented a house in Brooklyn and said, “We have a spare bedroom in this house, and you can live with us.”

Macrae: Technically, Kevin and I are both great. I don't know if our company is legal. It's probably only legal in Massachusetts.

Go To Topic

With the success of Super Missile Attack, Macrae and Curran realized they could expand their game enhancement kit business. They tried modifying Atari's hit game Asteroids and other games, but a Japanese maze-breaking game caught their attention.

Namco's Pac-Man was released in the U.S. by Bally Midway in the fall of 1980, but it didn't become popular in the U.S. until early 1981. With its iconic characters and easy-to-understand gameplay, Pac-Man quickly became a cultural phenomenon that transcended video games and permeated merchandising, music, and even television.

Macrae: After the success of Missile Attack, we decided we should give it another try. The most successful game at the time was Pac-Man, so we wanted to make an enhancement kit for Pac-Man.

Golson: Pac-Man was a huge hit in Japan and the Far East, and we knew it was going to be a big hit.

Macrae: We had a console dedicated to playing Pac-Man, and we played it over and over again, trying to find its weaknesses and asking ourselves, are we getting bored? Why did we keep playing this game for so long?

We realized that Pac-Man had the same problem as Missile Command. That is, once people got the hang of the game mode and kept playing it, they realized that it was pretty much the same game. It seemed like it progressed a little faster, but there was only one level, and not much else that changed.

Golson: We wanted to have multiple levels at a time, not just one. We wanted the character algorithm to be truly random, which would make the game unpredictable and more difficult. These were the top things we had to solve.

Macrae: We approached it the same way we did with Missile Command, trying to find the essence of Pac-Man and make it better. So Crazy Otto came about.

GCC hopes to avoid copyright issues by reshaping the characters and appearance of the Pac-Man game to be similar but not identical to the original.

Golson: We had a woman named Patty Goodson, who was a professional musician, come in and give us some ideas for the game. I remember her drawing of Crazy Otto. I'm not sure if she drew it after we came up with the name and the image of Crazy Otto, or if that was the name she came up with.

We started working on Crazy Otto in late May or early June of 1981, almost immediately after Super Missile Attack was finished. For Crazy Otto, we gave him legs and blue eyes, which were inspired by the Pac-Man game.

During the development of the enhancement kit for Pac-Man, most of the GCC employees moved to a five-room house in Wayland, Massachusetts. Initially, Doug Macrae, Kevin Curran, Steve Golson, Chris Rode, John Tylko, and a friend named Larry Dennison all lived in the house. Then they brought in two more engineers to help with the project: Mike Horowitz and Phil Kaaret. Macrae soon got married and moved out, but the house continued to be where the company worked.

Mike Horowitz, former software engineer at General Computer: They all went to MIT, they all knew each other, and they all lived in this house at the time.

Macrae: Mike Horowitz was an engineer at Cornell University. I had worked at the same company as him, Computervision, and I recruited him.

Golson: The house belonged to a professor who was on a sailing trip to Norway for vacation.

Horowitz: Doug and I didn't live there because we were both newly married. But we were both pretty aggressive, so we would compete to see who could get there first. To the right of the door is the kitchen. To the left is what I guess you would call the sun room. It's a big room, and that's where we keep all of our simulators.

Macrae: We used in-circuit simulators from Tektronix, which are essentially $25,000 computers, to simulate the microprocessor in Pac-Man.

Golson: There was a desk by the front door where our secretary, Cathy Rohrs, sat.

Macrae: We were making Super Missile Attacks in our basement, perfecting them, packaging them. We would answer the phone and take orders from anywhere in the room.

Horowitz: I came in and started adjusting the simulator and coding, which was about 7 or 8 in the morning. Other people would come downstairs in their pajamas at 10 or 11, have breakfast, and then come to see what I was doing.

Golson: I remember sometimes I would come downstairs in my pajamas, and we would. Because we were working nonstop, basically. Doug was married, but he was here all the time.

Just like Pac-Man, only better

The house was isolated on a wooded hillside, and everyone lived and worked together in a close and comfortable way, and they also began to implement plans to improve Pac-Man.

Macrae: The mazes are designed very carefully because they help the player avoid monsters and dangers. We spent time creating something interesting that is also a challenge for the player, and we decided that it would be more exciting to let the monsters move freely without trapping them. We initially designed them on graph paper, then moved them into the game and finally tried them out. We kept fighting them until we were satisfied.

Horowitz: I was different from everyone else at GCC, I graduated from college in 1979. Doug said he wouldn't pay me, but my wife's income was enough to cover our daily expenses.

When I joined, they had already designed the maze. I had to catch up quickly. I had no idea what a microprocessor was, or video, or anything. I was just working with CAD/CAM software.

The first thing I did was the sound. We had to reverse engineer the game. It's almost impossible to reverse engineer the sound generator, but I just tried, for example, replacing 24 with 6E to see what happened. I changed the sound effects of the whole game just like that. Chris Rode did the music.

Golson: I remember Chris sitting at the piano trying to come up with music for the spectator mode and the pauses in the game.

Horowitz: Then I made the animations for the pauses in the game. I remember driving to a friend's wedding. It was a long drive, and it was just me and my wife in the car, and I was thinking about the music in my head. And then I came up with three animations. It was basically boy meets girl, they fall in love with each other, and then they get married.

Macrae: We're constantly evolving and looking for new things, and we thought maybe we could add some moving fruit.

Golson: We wanted to have fruit that moved around the maze because the hardware allowed you to have six moving objects. And since you already had four monsters and Pac-Man, why not have some moving fruit as a bonus? In the original Pac-Man game, there was no moving fruit. So we said, "Well, if the hardware allows it, why don't we make it move?"

Macrae: Once the fruit starts moving, the game becomes really fun and people want to try to catch those fruits.

Golson: With the fruit concept, we still have to be careful not to infringe on other copyrights. If someone has an obvious logo, such as Pac-Man, monsters and Galaxian ship, we will not use it. This is our change.

The two cherries are not our logo because every slot machine has two cherries. The fruit in the game is real. There are pretzels in the game because Kevin Curran really likes pretzels.

With new mazes and fresh monsters, Crazy Otto aims to break the mold of Pac-Man gamers and deliver a perfect experience in one session. This will give Crazy Otto the potential for longevity that Pac-Man never had.

Horowitz: The original Pac-Man formula was completely deterministic. It was played the same way every time. You could hide in one spot and wait and see, and the game would continue forever because the monsters would never catch you.

We added some randomness, we gave the monsters different modes, and made them change according to the different game levels and the length of time each mode is limited to. Players will chase Pac-Man, they will also run away from Pac-Man, they will go to a certain corner of the maze, or keep turning left. When they need to hide in a corner, these corners are random and different every time. Let the players enjoy the freshness.

Dispute with Atari

Shortly after Super Missile Attack was released, while GCC was still developing Crazy Otto, Atari saw that Missile Command had not yet been copyrighted and planned to sue GCC to stop publishing the game. In July 1981, GCC heard about Atari's plans from a local game distributor and rushed to make sure it could choose the trial location, which would be held in Massachusetts instead of California. This put GCC in a favorable position at trial, and then a division of media giant Warner Communications sued GCC for $15 million.

Horowitz: I was involved, and a few weeks later, Atari filed a restraining order against GCC, trying to stop us from selling Super Missile Attack.

Golson: At that time, Atari was like Google and Microsoft, both high-tech giants that always did something amazing.

I think they felt like we were just threatened, "Oh my god, Atari is suing us." I'm sure this would work on other people who cloned the game and sent them a warning letter saying, "Please stop making Asteroids T-shirts because this is our trademark." They would say, "Oh, sure. We'll do whatever you say."

Instead, we said, "That's fine, we'll see you in court." We felt that if we could get Atari to notice us, we were doing a good job.

We had nothing to lose, and we thought carefully about what they would sue us for, which was nothing more than infringement of their copyrights and trademarks and unfair trade practices. We thought about how to design the kit so as not to infringe on others' copyrights and trademarks. It's not that we just entered this industry and didn't know anything about infringement, or that we knew about infringement and continued to do it.

Horowitz: We could destroy the discs that had our stuff added to them, but we didn't want to do that because of all the legal issues with copyright, so we didn't want to copy their code. All the code was written by us and added to the game, like aftermarket stuff.

Golson: We sell our stuff to game distributors, they put our discs in their consoles, and then people can play our Missile Command. For business reasons and legal reasons, this is our model. We are also very confident that if we go to court, we will win.

The judge gave GCC a chance to win: if GCC was willing to resubmit a new version of the game, it could be sold locally, but Atari still succeeded in obtaining a temporary restraining order, which prohibited the sale of Super Missile Attack until the trial.

GCC's actions and courage caught Atari off guard, and the lawsuit became a nuisance for Atari executives, who were unprepared to be told by a Massachusetts court that their games could not appear in the domestic market. The lawsuit also created some public relations problems and attracted attention from the press, so Atari just wanted to get it over with.

Macrae: We argued in court for a long time, and eventually Atari came to us and said, "What do you want?" They definitely didn't want the enhancement kit to be done. We said, "We really just want to design the game."

To quickly resolve the situation, they gave us a development contract and said, "We'll give you two years, $50,000 a month, or $1.2 million in total, and in exchange you'll develop games for us, no strings attached." We really didn't have to do anything to resolve the situation.

We later realized that Atari just didn't want to see us, so they either went to the beach or went back to school, but we really wanted to develop games for them.

Golson said, this is severance pay. But we said, "No, we're going to design games for you." We took the money and started to deliver on our promise.

Attracting MIDWAY's attention

On October 8, 1981, the end of the lawsuit between GCC and Atari marked the beginning of a New England company, and also meant that in the next few years, GCC would design many video games for Atari and a new home game (7800). But the most pressing issue at this time was Crazy Otto, because of the conflict between GCC and Atari at that time, Crazy Otto was shelved.

Golson: As part of the negotiations with Atari, Kevin and Doug said, "Hey, we've been working on Pac-Man all year so why don't we try to sell it? This doesn't preclude us from any deal with Atari."

Atari said, "Well, we'll let you sell enhancement kits as long as you get permission from the manufacturer."

Macrae: Atari didn't want [unauthorized] enhancement kits in the industry because it would set a precedent they didn't want.

Golson: So Kevin called Dave Marofske, the chairman of Midway, and there was a quiet conversation between the two chairmen. Kevin said, "Dave, maybe you saw in the news that Atari dropped its lawsuit against us, and we'd like to offer you a kit for your Pac-Man game."

Macrae: We told him we would produce the enhancement kits. We just wanted their blessing and not have to meet them in court.

Golson: Marofske has been fighting in court against people making unauthorized Pac-Man merchandise, so now we called him and talked to him about it, and he thought it was awesome.

Marofske said, “Hey, are you guys going to Chicago? Why don’t you come and show off your product?”

Macrae: We happened to show up shortly after their Pac-Man demo. They had been running it nonstop for a few months, but it wasn’t working, and they decided to lay off a bunch of people, and we showed up at the right time.

Golson: Kevin, Doug and I took our kits to meet with the Midway guys, including Marofske and Stan Jarocki, the head of marketing at Midway. They brought in a couple of guys who knew Pac-Man and were really good at it. They played with it for a while and really liked it.

They said, "Thank you very much," and gave each of us a Pac-Man tie, which we put on and flew home.

Macrae: Midway was very impressed with Crazy Otto. The game was very well received. We had already tested it in Framingham, Massachusetts, and it was very profitable.

Golson: Over the next week, we negotiated with them what kind of agreement we would reach.

Macrae: Midway said, “Let’s not make a power-up kit, let’s make a Pac-Man sequel.”

Golson: I got a more complete kit a week later, and they put it in a Chicago arcade to test it out and see how it worked. That was mid-October.

Macrae: There, a photographer for Time magazine wanted to do a story about video games, and he wanted to take a picture of Pac-Man. He went to a game console and watched Crazy Otto and took a picture, and used it as a promotional photo for Pac-Man.

Golson: The location tests went well. We signed the Crazy Otto deal with them on October 29th. It's about the rights, if they just sell the kit we get a lot of money, if they sell the full game we get a nice fee. So now we're all working like crazy to perfect it and make it mass-producible.

Horowitz: The fact that Doug and Kevin knew that there was only one way they could sell this thing, and they knew how to convince Midway, was a great sales job. They were just kids, 21 years old.

Become the new Pac-Man game

After signing the Crazy Otto contract with Bally Midway on October 29, 1981, GCC began to modify their former illegal game model into a full sequel to Pac-Man. With Midway's guidance and Namco's funding, Crazy Otto began to develop in an entirely new thematic direction.

Macrae: Midway said, "Let's do a sequel," and we didn't need to shy away from the name Pac-Man. They said, "Let's do Super Pac-Man." I think that was the first time they had ever suggested a game.

We're also looking at these game animations. The first animation in Crazy Otto: a yellow-legged Pac-Man meets a red-legged Pac-Man, who is obviously female because a heart appears above their heads. They chase each other, fall in love with each other, and eventually have a baby, which is brought to them by a stork.

We followed the lead of the animation: "Wow, we have a whole storyline of Yellow Pac-Man meeting Red Pac-Man. Why don't we make it male and female and add more personality?"

Golson: In the space of two weeks, it went from Crazy Otto to Super Pac-Man to Miss Pac-Man. To some extent, Pac-Woman. And then very quickly to Ms. Pac-Man.

Macrae: "Pac-Woman" didn't sound good, so we changed it to "Miss Pac-Man." Then one day someone pointed out that the two people in the third animation had a baby, so we had to design them as a couple.

Mike Horowitz said the game should be called Mrs. Pac-Man. Mike married Eileen Mullarkey but she refused to take her husband's last name. She didn't like being called Mrs. Horowitz or Mrs. Mullarkey. She preferred to be called Ms. Mullarkey.

Horowitz: The feminist movement was so big, and "Ms." was a new word. I got married in 1981, and my wife didn't want to take my last name. She said if I changed my name to hers, she would change her name to something else, just because she didn't want us to have the same name.

Horowitz: My wife is an independent woman. In the anime, it's implicit but clear that they're married because they have a child. But she's still called a lady.

After two weeks of debating the name of the new female Pac-Man, Horowitz began designing some new illustrations for the game to give it a fresh look.

Macrae: Mike Horowitz came up with Ms. Pac-Man, and there was a review cycle going on with Bally Midway and Namco in Japan. Our first character was a Ms. Pac-Man with shoulder-length red hair, but no shoulders.

Horowitz: Designing the characters is hard. I draw them on graph paper and colored pencils, and then you get a 16×16 three-color image that you have to compile yourself into a CD-ROM drive, which is not easy.

Macrae: We sent the disc to Midway, who sent it to Masaya Nakamura, the chairman of Namco Japan, for review. He said, "I like the concept, but don't give Pac-Man hair." Ms. Pac-Man lost her hair (it was still Pac-Woman). The beauty logo and lips were kept, and a bow was added, and that was it.

Masaya Nakamura passed away on January 22, 2017.

Golson: There were some suggestions from the Midway guys: "Hey, let's add a bow, let's add eyelashes and beauty marks. It was only 16×16 pixels at the time. There were many iterations and trying many different things, but finally we finished it and made the Pac-Man look that we wanted.

Macrae: We used Lite Brite to make Ms. Pac-Man and see what the other characters looked like. It's a relatively cheap character creation system. Mike Horowitz still draws them himself on graph paper.

Negotiation with NAMCO

Due to the unique origin of Ms. Pac-Man, many newspapers, magazines and news reports have some doubts about who has the credit for this game, such as whether Namco really approved Midway to create Ms. Pac-Man, and whether Midway and Namco have the legal license to develop the Pac-Man game. Now, Doug Macrae and other GCC veterans have emphasized that Namco has a clear understanding of the entire development process of the Pac-Man game.

Macrae: Basically Namco was fully behind Ms. Pac-Man. In fact, their chairman was even involved in the character's image. At the same time, I believe there was a bit of embarrassment within Japan that the sequel was not developed in their own labs, but somewhere else.

However, Namco still gets to collect royalties from Ms. Pac-Man, just like the old Pac-Man, while Midway has to pay royalties not only to Namco but also to us.

Even during the production run, Ms. Pac-Man was still a spin-off, so Midway would sell a copy of Ms. Pac-Man for every copy of the old Pac-Man. This way, Namco would not only get royalties from the old Pac-Man, but also from Ms. Pac-Man.

Horowitz: If you open Ms. Pac-Man, we still have some of the old code in our processor, but when the program reaches certain addresses, it jumps to the new data and runs the new game.

Macrae: Each Ms. Pac-Man game has a datapad for the original Pac-Man and a Ms. Pac-Man add-on, just like Super Missile Attack, which is an add-on. If you remove the add-on, you have the original Pac-Man. The idea was to combine the two into one datapad once we started production, but the schedule was so fast that the entire production run of Ms. Pac-Man was not what we had planned, but we produced the original datapad plus the new enhancement kit.

Ms. Pac-Man wasn’t the only thing Midway suggested to the GCC development team. In the end, they kept pushing GCC to finish the game, and GCC had to repeatedly improve and fix bugs. But Midway still insisted that Ms. Pac-Man was theirs.

Golson: The only difference between Crazy Otto and Ms. Pac-Man that we showed Midway was the characters. The characters and monsters from Crazy Otto became the monsters and women in the Ms. Pac-Man game, and there were some bug fixes that didn't affect the characters, but nothing else. The music, the colors, the mazes, the gameplay, nothing was Midway's idea.

Macrae: The fourth monster in Ms. Pac-Man is called Sue, and she’s my sister. I always like to joke about her. I really like naming a monster after my sister. I think it’s a great way to do it.

Horowitz: At the end of the day, I found a place where Ms. Pac-Man could hide. But we didn't want to be boring, so the last thing we did was to design a red monster. When the red monster goes into chase mode, it stays in that mode and chases Ms. Pac-Man. So at this point, if you find a corner where you can hide, you're safe. Because once the red monster starts chasing you, they won't stop and, well, catch you.

Golson: Midway kept asking us to make changes that we thought were stupid. They would say, "Do this." We were like, OK. Then they would say, "No, no, do this." They would do this all the way into December, January, and we were just trying to get it done.

Horowitz: We gave the data class and the software to Midway, and they did the rest.

Get success!

Ms. Pac-Man was unveiled at a Namco press conference on February 3, 1982, at the Castle Oaks Park recreation center near Los Angeles. Local media carried the event across the country via wire services, and the new female character in the Pac-Man game was featured in the media nationwide, with headlines such as "Why Pac-Man is smiling? Because he's sharing his home." By all accounts, the response was enthusiastic from both the media and video game players.

Horowitz: There's an old arcade called 1001 Plays between Central Square and Harvard Square in Cambridge, and we found out they had Pac-Man, so we all went over there because it wasn't too far from us. It's amazing to see something you made.

We had no idea how people would respond to the game, but when we got there and saw people playing it, I think that was the day the game took off.

Golson: The game has been very well received. All the changes we made from the old Pac-Man to the new one have been universally received by people, who say, “Pac-Man was a great game, and this one is even better.” And they’re right, because all of the changes were very thoughtful.

Macrae: Midway was also busy, and they kept producing as long as there were orders. They sold about 117,000 copies. GCC made about $10 million from Pac-Man.

Golson: That was the biggest thing that year. We were on top of the world. We were just college dropouts in a rented apartment, and we had made a deal with Atari, the largest consumer electronics company in the world, to create this video game. Wow, we just did everything perfectly.

Interestingly, the reason why the new version of Pac-Man can maintain such impressive sales is that the game hardware design has built-in security protection devices to prevent illegal theft or pirated sales in the market, which would affect the sales of genuine products.

Steve Golson: There was a chip called a PAL - Programmable Array Logic. You could program your own digital logic into it, and it would prevent it from being read or backed up, so you wouldn't know any of the details of the programming.

Four of these chips are used in the Pac-Man game, and the security technology is much more sophisticated than that of Super Missile Attack. It prevents criminals from stealing the code, because there are certainly people who would try to do so.

Pac-Man was a huge hit, but GCC didn't stop there, and they were busy with their contract with Atari. They developed many more video games and achieved good results, allowing the company to survive the twilight of the golden age of American video games - 1983-1984, a period when many video game companies went bankrupt.

Macrae: The speed of success was incredible, not only was Ms. Pac-Man going into production, and 117,000 of them were done very quickly, but at the same time we were designing games for Atari, off. Not in the same volumes in the arcades, but we were doing very well in the domestic market.

In addition to Pac-Man, we released 76 other games over the next few years, primarily for the Atari 2600 and 5200, and eventually the 7800, and we designed each of them and made a ton of money on each of them.

Horowitz: Gaming eras are short lived. After four years, the whole gaming market pretty much collapsed. Atari was sold, and we lost our funding, so we started doing other things.

Macrae: It wasn't until 1984, 1985 that we started to slow down, when the market slowed down and we had a chance to think about other things.

Pac-Man Efforts

Like the previous Pac-Man games, the new Pac-Man became an overnight sensation and spawned a plethora of peripheral products, including T-shirts, comic books, lunch boxes, toothbrushes, sheets, pajamas, board games, puzzles, trash cans, etc. Soon after, GCC even created a spin-off video game for Midway called Jr. Pac-Man.

During this period, GCC was busy with new projects, while Midway was trying its best to get the license for the Pac-Man game. On a Saturday morning in September 1982, a group of animations from Hanna-Barbara debuted, which attracted the attention of GCC. Hanna-Barbara's animations were the entire animated plot of the Pac-Man game. If GCC did not speak up, its copyright would be ignored.

Macrae: The question of who actually owns the patent for the Pac-Man game is a very complicated one. New Pac-Man games were originally created as derivatives of old games. And the whole concept of derivatives is not well-established in intellectual property law.

Obviously, for us, there can't be a new Pac-Man without the old one. You can't just pay royalties for the new one and ignore Namco's fees for the old one. That being said, we believe that we should also have a share of the royalties because we are the creators of the new one, we created the entire Pac-Man family.

Horowitz: They made all the Pac-Man stuff. The dolls and the plush stuff. But none of it was created by Midway. So I think we took it to court. Because we created it, we think we have a right to the proceeds.

Macrae: Our "family law suit" against Midway was concluded in 1983, and we claimed that we were the mother of the Pac-Man family because we created Ms. Pac-Man and Little Pac-Man. The first member of the second generation appeared in the third animation, as the baby in the stork's mouth.

Ultimately, we had a three-way agreement with Midway and Namco that defined their respective rights for the next few years, the characters in each version of Pac-Man, and the rules for how the game could be used elsewhere. In the 1980s, all of this had to be spelled out in great detail.

Almost 20 years later, Pac-Man has re-emerged in a way that was not covered in the agreement. In 2000, Namco America released a console called Ms. Pac-Man / Galaga-Class 1981, which was the most popular video game of the year for both companies, and now they have combined the two into one game, which represents a second release of Pac-Man. The only problem is that they did not get the consent of GCC.

When the old guard at GCC heard about the console, Macrae and others knocked on Namco's door to see what was going on. They were shocked.

Macrae: They hadn't even heard of us or knew we were the creators of Pac-Man.

Golson: When we talked to the people at Namco, we said, “Look, hey, we designed this. We designed this whole kit in Massachusetts. And they were like, “What? What are you talking about?”

Macrae: But it was understandable because the two Namco executives who signed the agreement with us, Nakajima and Nakamura, had passed away in 1981. And this game console was just developed by Namco's American branch. We found the old contract, faxed it to them, and started our negotiations.

After the initial confusion was resolved, Namco America and GCC's former shareholders negotiated for five years, from 2002 to 2007. After the first round of confrontation with Namco's new executives, the second round was in full swing, during which time Pac-Man was launched on platforms that had never been available in the 1980s: such as iPods, mobile phones and plug-and-play game consoles. At this point, the two companies reached a new agreement, the terms of which are confidential.

Macrae: When they decided to release a new game, I don’t think they ever realized that Pac-Man wasn’t theirs. We’re not making the same big splash that we did in the ’80s. I don’t think we’ve always kept our word, so we don’t really care. Fame was never something we were after, so it didn’t matter.

Horowitz: I think we were both very low-key. Later on, some people found out that we made it, and there was some talk about it online, but we're engineers, right? So we were very low-key guys. We didn't brag about it all the time, but our friends would say so.

Golson: Getting paid is the first step to gaining trust. We thought, finally, someone is writing this great history of video games, and we're going to talk about how it came about.

Horowitz: Doug and Kevin are both very nice. When I first joined the company, I didn't get paid, but Doug said that developers would get 10% of the profits. The last arbitration thing, we didn't do anything but reply to some emails, but they still gave us 10%. They don't owe us anything, they are good people.

To date, Namco has not publicly acknowledged that the Pac-Man game was created in the U.S., and Toru Iwatani, the creator of the original Pac-Man, has refused to comment on this new version being made in the U.S. I have attempted to contact Toru Iwatani since 2011, but have received no response.

Golson: At some point, I really want to sit down with Toru Iwatani and say, "Hey, what do you think of us?"

Yeah, I suspect they're a little annoyed, but I think they're proud of Pac-Man, and they should be. Pac-Man is a really great game.

I think Pac-Man has a lot of flaws and needs improvement, and that bothers them. Maybe that's what they think. Although I also think it's unfair to them.

Horowitz: Usually, the Americans create a lot of innovations, and then the Japanese will take that innovation, improve it, and sell it back to us, so this time, I think we did it the Japanese way.

Pac-Man is really great. There are a lot of games, like Tetris, that are really simple, but they're really fun. They come up with these great ideas, and we pick up the slack and make a better game.

Golson: Frankly speaking, I believe that many games under the Namco brand are designed by third parties, but they will not make any statement about it. Because if you sign someone to do some work for you, whether you admit it or not, it is up to you. Our goal is to get what we deserve, and we don't care about other things.

Macrae: Pac-Man brought in a ton of money for Namco. They made as much money from the new Pac-Man sold to the U.S. as they did from the old one. If you wanted your share, they didn't care.

The final journey

Thirty-five years after its release, Pac-Man remains an iconic and addictive game. It also makes the news from time to time. In January this year, computer scientists taught an AI to play Pac-Man, and the AI ​​actually played better than humans, setting a record of 43,720.

After a brief but impressive stint in the video game industry, GCC pivoted, designing the first internal hard drive for the Macintosh and building a groundbreaking set-top box for TV Guide before settling into laser printers.

Horowitz: How did it change my life? From a career perspective, I met a lot of smart people because of it. We made a lot of money, which was amazing. I also bought a house with the money I made from Pac-Man, and I still live there.

As for Pac-Man, it's not a part of my life. It's just a game we made in less than a year, and it's interesting, but I won't hype it up and say that I made it.

Golson: I'll tell you it's been a real journey. It's the most famous video game in America, and I'm proud to be one of the designers. If other people knew about it, they might want to hear the story. It's helped me on a personal level because it's given me a good income.

Horowitz: I was 24 when Pac-Man came out. I have four daughters, and two of them are older than I was when I made the game. So sometimes they complain, "Dad, I'm 25 and I haven't designed the most popular video game yet. I'm a failure."

Macrae: I have a Pac-Man machine in my basement. I'm pretty good at it, but my wife's best friend is even better at it. She can use her toes to play it, and she can even beat me with my hands and my toes to play it.

Horowitz: Pac-Man is everywhere. If you drive down the Massachusetts Turnpike, you'll see Pac-Man and Galaga at every service station, every gas station.

It's just an experience in my life: It's great, all good memories. It's the only cultural phenomenon I've created.

via fastcompany