The history of Pac-Man and its development cycle — the drive to attract female gamers, the extremely Japanese name, the flash of inspiration that came from a pizza missing a slice — is pretty well documented by this point. What hasn’t been talked as much about is how the 1980 arcade game’s creator, Toru Iwatani, got into the business in the first place. It turns out that, despite the Japanese-ness of Pac-Man Iwatani was driven into the game industry by a love for pinball, an almost completely American invention.
Born in 1955, Iwatani had a penchant for creating little board games and such to amuse himself with since childhood. The turning point for him, however, didn’t come until he developed an addition to pinball as a middle-school student. “This was before video games, so in the lounges of bowling alleys and so forth, you’d have pinball,” he told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. “The art on the tables was always neat, and the way that people stood in front of the machine and played was just really cool to me. There’s a simple beauty to the gravitational physics that those games use, something that I think really sung to me as a boy. So I was charmed by pinball all through high school.”
