CUT THE RIBBON: TōRU IWATANI

Posted on December 10, 2012 by admin

Toru Iwatani can be considered God among men in the gaming industry. Do you know that we also have to thank a pizza pie for it? In 1977, a young Toru Iwatani was the first to program for Namco, a computer software company. During 1978-79 he had designed arcade releases like Gee Bee, Bomb Bee, and Cutie-Q. After working on these three titles, Iwatani wished to create a game that would target women and couples. His eureka moment came when he removed a slice of pizza from a pie, creating the visual inspiration for his next big thing. It was in this moment that, according to Iwatani, Pac-Man was officially born. Iwatani determined that food and eating would be the way to get the fairer sex interested. Iwatani was born in Tokyo, Japan. He joined the computer software company Namco in 1977, where he started his career in pinball machines. There, he came up with the idea for a game called “Puck-Man” and in 1980, and assembled a team to release the game within the same year.

Puck-Man became a huge success and icon of the 80s as the most popular arcade video games at the times were space shooters. In Pac Man, the enemies are colored ghosts or goblins, or octopi whose movements are strictly deterministic in the chase-game. The concept of eating, and the original Japanese title was Pakkuman was inspired by the Japanese onomatopoeic slang phrase paku paku taberu wherepaku paku describes the sound of the mouth movement when widely opened and then closed in succession.