“It’s Mostly About How Scary Fruit Is”: An Oral History Of Pac-Man
“Fruit could turn into a ghost any second. Kids need to know that.”
“Pac-Man all started from one, basic, simple concept,” explains Shigeo Funaki, the lead programmer. “Fruit is terrifying. Ever since I was just a little kid, every time I saw a piece of fruit, I could feel my heartbeat rising. Trees don’t make a tasty treat out of the goodness of their hearts. Trees are horrible, wooden men, and they hate you. Your ‘healthy snack’ could turn into a ghost and kill you any second.”
“Shigeo was really scared of fruit,” Toshio Kai, the sound designer says. “One time, I invited him over to my house, where I had a fruitbowl. The moment he saw it, he started screaming. I knew, at that moment, that the two of us were destined to work together.”
“I do think that children should be more afraid of fruit,” Toru Iwatani, who did the planning for the game, says. “Is Shigeo right that fruit is a plot on the part of trees to kill us and replace us with ghosts? Maybe, maybe not. But anything that has vitamin C, dietary fiber and a pleasant taste? It should be approached with fear. There’s no question of that in my mind.”
“The other thing that was on our mind was the situation of our CEO, Masaya Nakamura,” Shigeo continues. “His son had recently been born with the head of a bull, and so he had to confine him to a labyrinth, where he would be fed virgins. Usually interns. We thought it would be sort of a nice tribute to all bull-headed monsters to include a labyrinth in the video game.”
“I think my son was very touched that we made a video game for him,” Nakamura himself explained in an interview at the time. “Of course, I can’t be sure. I’ve never seen him since I trapped him in the labyrinth. But we sent in a virgin with a copy of the arcade cabinet strapped to his back, and we never saw either of them again.”
“A lot of people have made jokes about the pills,” Iwatani tells us. “They like to read some kind of secret, dark meaning into them. But in fact, that’s just how computer programmers eat. They run along the floor gobbling everything that’s small enough to fit into their horrible, little mouths. Frankly, we just forgot to tell Shigeo that normal people don’t do that.”
“Pills are my favorite thing to find when I’m groundmunching,” says Funaki. “Because once you have one of those, you know that you’ve got enough of at least one nutrient. No way to know which, but you’re set for something. I wanted players to experience the joy I feel when I eat a pill off the floor.”
“It was my job to arrive early in the morning and scatter some pills on the ground for Shigeo,” recalls Kai. “Sometimes I considered telling him about tables, but I thought it would make him sad.”
“So we had our setting, our enemies, and our basic gameplay,” Iwatani continues. “All that was left was to figure out our main character. That was really the most difficult part. I felt strongly that our character needed a complete digestive system. Our CEO, however, believed that digesting is disgusting and immoral, and no video game should include it. Finally, we came to a compromise: Pac-Man could have a mouth, but no entrails or stomach.”
“Video games give us the freedom to imagine a perfect world,” says Nakamura. “And that means a world without digestion. Our stomach is full of acid that melts the things we eat? Horrible. That’s not what Bandai-Namco stands for.”
“Pac-Man does not have a stomach,” Funaki insists. “That’s where his name comes from. He can’t digest any of the food he eats, so it’s all just packed in there. Pack-Man.”
“Eventually he’ll explode of course,” Iwatani adds. “That is his fate, and every victory only brings him closer to it. It’s the tragedy of Pac-Man, but we’ve all come to accept it. Because until then?”
He leans forward and smiles. “Until then, he’s a great video game character.”
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