The Beautiful Game

The yella fella: The classic videogame Pac-Man is being rereleased on Microsoft's XBox 360. Courtesy Namco Bandai Games Inc.

Recently, I played Pac-Man for the first time in almost two decades. The sensation can be compared to smearing a viscous, palliative balm on your brain. So soothing was the experience that it took 10 minutes for me to realize I was drooling.

The occasion was the Xbox Live Arcade re-release of the venerable game on its 25th anniversary. Pac-Man has been retrofitted for Microsoft’s spanking new techno marvel, the Xbox 360. Bill Gates and co. have spent an immense amount of sweat and equity on a system designed for games like Gears of War, which has something to do with saving earth from a race of evil locust people rising from the bowels of hell to enslave humanity. So why is a simple game like Pac-Man — in which the titular hero runs around a maze gobbling small pills and eluding ghosts — being reintroduced with such hoopla? And in an industry obsessed with progress, why is something a quarter of a century old coming to an Xbox near you with absolutely no enhancements?

In the early 1980s, Pac-Man was a phenomenon without parallel. There was the Pac-Man TV show, a Pac-Man song; Pac-Man even appeared on the front cover of Time magazine as a metaphor for crooked politicians and their tendency to gobble cash and resources. He was a pop-culture sensation that could only have occurred at the dawn of the blockbuster era, a time when the George Lucasian sheen of hype and marketing started to eclipse content. The rise of movie sequels like Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and MTV-ready bands like Duran Duran proved that pop culture events were increasingly the result of strategic planning rather than genuine, spontaneous public interest. Pac-Man, on the other hand, just happened. He munched his way into this new universe with shocking voracity. He became the icon of a brand new age. There will never be another videogame with such sweeping influence.

Pac-Man was the brainchild of designer Toru Iwatani at Japanese gaming company Namco. Legend tells us that the primary inspiration for the glabrous yellow hero was a slice of pizza sitting on Iwatani’s desk. (There are numerous theories as to Pac-Man’s inception; the common theme appears to be gorging.) The game’s Japanese launch in 1979 met with middling response. This was, after all, the era of Space Invaders, a halcyon time when 30 pixels suitably arranged on a monitor comprised a videogame; nascent gamers insisted on killing aliens, even if the aliens didn’t look like much of anything. Then, something strange and inexplicable occurred: Pac-Man caught on. Repackaged and released in North America in 1980 by Bally/Midway Games, Pac-Man represented a Gladwellesque tipping point: the moment that brought videogames into the collective consciousness.

There have been other pixilated paragons: the Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Lara Croft, Sonic the Hedgehog. But none have had the cultural tsunami effect of the Pac-meister. Pac-Man provided an entirely new way of interfacing with technology: an emotional one. The little guy had character, but not in a way that was analogous to any cultural icon that preceded him. He was pixels with personality. Maybe it was his dogged tenacity or the fact that he always seemed to be smiling, but he was the first digital creature conferred any measure of celebrity. With Pac-Man, gaming became a two-way interaction — between the gamer and the little yella fella. It fully sucked when Pac-Man died.

Pac-Man, the metaphor: The popular game made the cover of Time on October 25th, 1982. Photo Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

The whole Pac-Man concept — the little pills, the ghosts, the mesmerizing way they turn blue so that Pac-Man can eat them — was so whacko that it was entirely fresh. Indeed, Pac-Man was the first in a series of Japanese cultural exports (Hello Kitty and Pokemon among them) that littered the ’80s and ’90s. The decade was partly defined by a strange and uneasy confluence of North American and Japanese sensibilities. This was, after all, the time of the rising sun, when Japan became synonymous with technological innovation and aggressive economic and cultural expansion. Thus, Pac-Man, a character entirely free of intentional subtext, became freighted with substantial cultural baggage.

People all over the world have expended billions upon billions of hours at a joystick. We’ve all heard the PR-produced canard about the gaming industry’s magical and rapid success: it outstrips Hollywood in revenue; it is the entertainment of the future; kids would rather play basketball on a game console than on a black court.

This doesn’t explain why, in closed-door conferences, industry honchos wring their hands with an angst that belies all this good cheer. Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, asks: where are the games with “truly mass market appeal at mass market prices?” A statistically large proportion of women play puzzle-games online, but they are simply not a meaningful part of the paying gaming demographic. TV and movies became mass entertainment just a few years after their inception. Meanwhile, in the three decades that videogames have been the so-called leisure activity of the future, gaming’s dominance remains stubbornly, well, in the future. The gaming industry is beset with the same problems as the film industry: spiralling production costs, heavy reliance on the wizardry of techno-wonks and an addiction to derivative source material. (Much of it, incidentally, based on Hollywood product with the same issues. Talk about a snake eating its own tail.)

If the anniversary of Pac-Man teaches us anything, it’s that popular culture isn’t popular anymore. Much of it is a series of hysterically marketed non-event “events” pitching products so specialized and segmented that the term “popularity” can no longer apply. How many Grand Theft Auto gamers do you hang with? Halo 2 may have sold 2.38 million units on its first day of release, but those are sales figures rather than an indication of a galvanizing, universal experience. For the most part, the gaming industry is segmented into highly specialized sub-genres and sub-sub-genres.

And now, Pac-Man returns — if he ever really left at all. Retro gaming harks back to an era when you didn’t need the hand-eye coordination of a Navy SEAL to make it through Round 1 on Gears of War. Jason MacIsaac, a videogame history instructor at Toronto’s International Academy of Technology and Design, says it was “a more benevolent time when we weren’t so afraid of technology.”

Part of what interests MacIsaac is the hardware. He has a house full of gaming consoles from years past. He’s a person who collects the flotsam of early digital culture — ephemeral products of an unpopular popular culture that no longer produces any experience that lasts, but rather resurrects old brands and franchises. The new Xbox Live Arcade version of Pac-Man exists in cyberspace, to be downloaded on an immensely advanced piece of technology and played in High Definition on a flat-screen TV — all innovations that Pac-Man’s creator could never have envisioned as he stared at that hallowed slice of pizza. As such, the Xbox becomes a conduit, channelling the early '80s arcade experience. Because if this dazzling new device wants to move into the brilliant future gaming pundits have prophesied for so long, it must first act as a time machine.

For someone who came of age in the Pac-Man era, the experience of playing the game again is a profound one. It reactivates synapses you forget you had; it sends you on a KY-lubed waterslide back in time. It is what I call technostalgia, a phenomenon for those of us born on the cusp of the digital age. In lieu of new games with mass appeal, the gaming industry must content itself with technostalgia. In its desperation to create a nothing/something phenomenon like Pac-Man — and as a means of getting those of us with long memories back to playing videogames — the industry has returned to the fountainhead. Marshall McLuhan said it best: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Richard Poplak is a writer based in Toronto.

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