He’s been eating for years and still hasn’t gained weight. It was on May 22, 1980 that the video game was released in Japan.
The story goes that game creator Toru Iwatani wanted to develop a game that would appeal to women and men alike – unlike Space Invaders, Asteroids, and other more violent electronic fare of the period.
Who could have predicted that the yellow pie-shaped character, who gobbles through a maze, gobbles up dots and dodges ghosts, would become a legend in the game world – and beyond?
Originally called “Puck-Man”, a reference to “puck-puck”, the sound for chewing in Japan, the character got a new handle when he came to the United States to avoid an F-bomb reboot.
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Pac-Man became a roaring success, with inspiring sequels, merchandise, two television shows and a 1981 song, “Pac-Man Fever”, which reached number 9 on the Billboard charts. There was also an album that sold 1.2 million copies in late 1982.
Pac-Man is one of the highest-grossing and best-selling games, with 2016 revenue exceeding $14 billion and combined sales of 43 million units.
And the yellow pie-shaped creature is still chewing away, long after the days of legwarmers, steels and Care Bears.
Pac-Man is the most popular online game
A recent survey by the online gaming platform Yahtzee Craze shows that Pac-Man is America’s most popular online game.
The survey analyzed Google US and global data for the 14 most popular online searches related to the word “play” and ranked them according to the average monthly searches on Google in the US and worldwide.
Pac-Man achieved an average of 768,000 US Google searches. Dating back to 1976, Snake came in second, with an average of 669,000 searches per month.
Solitaire was number three in the US with 499,000 searches per month.
Rounding out the top five were Tic Tac Toe, which dates back to ancient Egypt, and Minesweeper, a slightly newer game released in 1989.
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So, do we feel a theme here?
“People who google video games are probably older people who played these games when they were growing up,” says Mark Deppe, director of UCI Esports at the University of California, Irvine. “Most of my students get information through Discord communities, on Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, and Reddit.”
Retro revival
Deppe noted that there has been a resurgence of some retro games recently.
“Chess is a great example because it has blown up on Twitch and there are now major college esports tournaments for it,” he said. “In June we hosted an old-school Tetris tournament at the UCI.”
An older video game also topped another survey. Minesweeper gaming experts said Take-Two Interactive’s (TWO) Developed nine years ago, Grand Theft Auto V is the most wanted video game in 15 different states, including New York.
Most searches for the game were in the South and Midwest.
The Minesweeper team analyzed Google search trends data for the top 25 most popular video games, according to the site HowLongtoBeat for the year 2022.
Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, is the seventh main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series and the 15th installment in total.
By June, more than 169 million copies of the game had been shipped worldwide across all platforms, and more copies were sold in 2020 than in any other year since launch.
God of War, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Horizon Zero Dawn are the second most wanted games in the US, coming out on top in Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire and New Jersey.
Minesweeper noted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Elden Ring, the most popular video game in Colorado and Oregon, were all released this year.
“Grand Theft Auto V, however, has been almost played by gamers for the last ten years,” the company said in a statement. “Clearly, the game’s compelling storyline, fun characters and gameplay still resonates with a large number of American gamers. It will be interesting to see how these results change throughout the year and into 2023.”
Deppe said he wasn’t surprised that gamers still love Grand Theft Auto V after all these years.
“As games come and go in popularity, people often return to the games they love,” he said.
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