Pac-Man

&nbsp Pac-Man is the protagonist fictional character of the franchise of the same name by Namco, who was first introduced in the arcade game Pac-Man in 1980. Ever since, the character appeared in more than 30 officially licensed game spin-offs, as well as in numerous unauthorized clones and bootlegs, spawned a variety of Pac-Man merchandise with his image, as well as a television series. undefined Pac-Man became a worldwide social phenomenon and Namco's mascot.

Character design
Pac-Man's origins are debated. According to the character's creator Tōru Iwatani, the inspiration was pizza without a slice, which gave him a vision of "an animated pizza, racing through a maze and eating things with its absent-slice mouth". However, he admittedly said in a 1986 interview that the design of the character also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for a mouth, kuchi. The name comes from the Japanese folklore character Paku who was known for his appetite as well as by the Japanese onomatopoeic slang phrase paku-paku taberu.

The arcade art on the original Puck-Man portrayed the character as a yellow circle with a large mouth as well as hands, feet, eyes and a long nose. In-game Pac-Man was represented as a two-dimensional sprite of a simple yellow circle with a mouth, 1984's Pac-Land was the first game (of many) to use his arcade art in-game. More recently Pac-Man appears as a full three-dimensional polygonal model. His design went through two minor changes from the Puck-Man cabinet art over the years, the first made his nose smaller in the 1990s and the second altered his eyes and shoes in 2010.