![]() ![]() Apart from its chromatics, Galaxian was typical of video games of the era, which is to say it was a more or less blatant rip-off of Taito's Space Invaders. Pac-Man was the brainchild of Toru Iwatani, a designer for Namco, the Japanese company best known at the dawn of the 1980s for releasing the first-ever color video arcade game, Galaxian. But all the later and equally novel video game landmarks - Donkey Kong and Mario, Street Fighter, Myst, Doom, the Sims - are eclipsed by Pac-Man's gigantic, canary-yellow sun. Certainly, the novelty of both the game and the medium itself was a major factor in creating the Pac-phenomenon. Yet no game to date has come close to dominating the popular landscape the way Pac-Man did in the early 1980s. The kids who grew up steering Pac-Man around his dot-filled maze have grown up to make video games one of the biggest slices of the entertainment-industry pie. Video games have become a part of contemporary life. Future generations will not believe it, but there was a moment when Pac-Man was as big as "Star Wars." A quick glimpse on eBay reveals, in no particular order: a set of Fleer wax-pack trading cards the classic Pac-Man metal lunchbox the Milton Bradley Pac-Man board game a 12-inch remix of the "Pac-Man Fever" single, featuring an instrumental version and, scarily enough, a club version Pac-Mania, the Official Pac-Man Joke Book ("96 Pac-filled pages of biting humor!") and yes, a Pac-Man telephone.
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