Pac-Man is officially 30 years old today. (This is what the internet has settled on, even though Bandai claims that it’s tomorrow.)
Just this morning the cleaning lady here professed that Pac-Man was her favorite of the arcade games we have in the NYU Game Center.
And I do think it is one of the few arcade games that remains as playable today as it was 20 or 30 years ago. Is it the Citizen Kane of video games? How would we tell? What would that mean? It certainly has a kind of internal coherence and perfection, a stylized graphical style that does not date, a gameplay that is clear, strategies that are sufficiently interesting, and little tricks like the fact that the ghosts switch between aiming for the player and wandering aimlessly, leading to many exciting near misses. It works.
It also happens to be playable on google.com:
Update: News.com writeup on Pac-Man, Google’s implementation.
Oh, I just played that.
When the page was shown, I felt that was only a typographical art (as usual). But the music comes, I felt playing mind (lusory attitude) just come to my brain and hands.
Mr. Iwatani writes at his autobiography, today (of 30 years ago) was the first time location test of original coin-op arcade game “PACMAN” at “Shibuya-Kaikan” (Shibuya, Tokyo).