In the late 1970s the growing popularity of video gaming saw arcades stuffed with coin-operated machines springing up across the globe. Namco's Pac-Man was one of the most popular and successful games of the era. It had a design inspired by both the shape of a pizza missing a slice and the Japanese symbol for mouth and was developed by Toru Iwatani, a games designer at the Japanese company Namco.
In May 1980 it was released in Japan as Puck Man. It was relatively unsuccessful in its home market. But when Midway Games released an American version (retitled Pac-Man to stop people defacing the machine) in October 1980, it proved a massive hit. Its addictively simple design focused on a yellow character that ate dots and tried to avoid four ghosts (nicknamed "Clyde", "Inky", "Blinky" and "Pinky").
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