Picture this: It's 1980, and a young Japanese game designer named Toru Iwatani is eating pizza with his colleagues. He removes a single slice and stares at what's left. That incomplete circle would become the most recognizable character in video game history, though not quite in the way Iwatani first imagined. The original Japanese name wasn't Pac-Man at all—it was "Puck-Man," derived from the Japanese "paku paku," an onomatopoeia for the sound of eating. Americans changed it before release, worried that vandals would alter the "P" to something less family-friendly on arcade cabinets.

What's absolutely wild is that Pac-Man was designed specifically to attract a demographic that arcades were completely ignoring: women. In the late 1970s, arcades were dominated by space shooters like Space Invaders and Galaxian—all violence and explosions. Iwatani wanted to create something that would appeal to couples on dates, something cute and non-violent. He chose eating as the core mechanic because everyone, regardless of gender, could relate to it. The ghost enemies were deliberately made colorful and cartoonish rather than scary, and each one was programmed with its own distinct personality and chase pattern. Blinky chases you directly, Pinky tries to position himself in front of you, Inky is unpredictable, and Clyde is just kind of doing his own thing.

The game's massive success caught everyone off guard, including Namco, the company that made it. Within a year of its U.S. release, Americans had pumped more than a billion quarters into Pac-Man machines. The game generated $1 billion in quarters by 1982—more than the entire film industry grossed that year. It sparked an unprecedented merchandising frenzy with everything from breakfast cereals to bedsheets, eventually racking up over $2.5 billion in revenue from merchandise alone. There was even a hit pop song, "Pac-Man Fever," that reached number nine on the Billboard charts. Billy Crystal name-dropped it at the Oscars. The yellow circle had transcended gaming to become a genuine cultural phenomenon.

But here's something most people don't know: the game was actually "beatable." A perfect Pac-Man game involves clearing all 256 levels without losing a life, which would give you exactly 3,333,360 points. Only one person accomplished this feat—Billy Mitchell, in 1999, after playing for six hours straight. The reason you can't go beyond level 256 is due to a programming quirk: the game uses an 8-bit integer to store the level number, and when it tries to display level 256, it overflows, creating the infamous "kill screen" where half the maze becomes a jumbled mess of letters and symbols. The right side of the screen turns into digital gibberish, making it impossible to collect all the dots and continue.

Pac-Man's legacy extends far beyond high scores and kill screens, though. It was the first video game to have cutscenes—those brief animated intermissions between levels showing Pac-Man being chased by the ghosts. These storytelling moments were revolutionary, proving that games could have narrative elements beyond just "shoot the aliens." The character also became video gaming's first true mascot, predating Mario by a full year. When the Smithsonian opened its video game exhibit in 2012, Pac-Man was front and center—not as a relic, but as recognition of the little pizza-inspired chomper who proved that games could be art, culture, and big business all at once.