Pac-Man cookies. (Image by Betsy Weber.)

Instapaper posted a link to an excellent story by Jamey Pittman about the creation of Pac-Man, which is, of course, one of the great successes in gaming and business history. It has all the info about how Namco game designer Toru Iwatani made “Puck-Man” (as it was originally called in Japan) a global sensation, even though it was no overnight one. The article’s opening paragraphs:

“It was 1977 when a self-taught, capable young man named Toru Iwatani came to work for Namco Limited, a Tokyo-based amusement manufacturer whose main product lines at the time were projection-based amusement rides and light gun shooting galleries. He was just 22 years old with no formal training in computers, visual arts, or graphic design, but his creativity and aptitude for game design were obvious to the Namco executives that met with Iwatani. They offered to hire him—with assurances they would find a place for him in the company—and he accepted.

Iwatani eventually found his place designing titles for Namco’s new video games division. His limited computer skills necessitated his being paired with a programmer who would write the actual code while Iwatani took on the role of game designer for the project. This was a new job for the game industry in 1977 when most games were designed by the programmers who coded them. In addition to a programmer, Iwatani’s team would usually include a hardware engineer to develop the various devices and components, a graphic artist to realize his visual ideas, and a music composer for any music and sound effects needed in the game.

Iwatani had initially wanted to work on pinball machines, but Namco had no interest in the pinball business. Perhaps as a concession, his first game design, called Gee Bee, was a paddle game similar to Atari’s Breakout but with a decidedly pinball-inspired slant to the gameplay. Released in 1978, it was Namco’s first original video game—they had only ported existing Atari games to the Japanese market up to this point—and it enjoyed moderate success in the arcades.”