September 5, 1979-Pac-Man's 'birthday?'

[mobo85]

In the first few paragraphs of D.B. Weiss’s Lucky Wander Boy, the main character, Adam Pennyman, points out the genesis of his Catalog of Obsolete Entertainments (which he is attempting to complete with the game in the title of the book) happened on September 5, 1999-twenty years to the date that Toru Iwatani removed a piece from a pizza and created the shape of Pac-Man.

Although the book is a mix of real and fictional video-game history (mostly fictional), is there any proof that the now-well-known pizza discovery (which, according to Iwatani himself, actually happened) really did occur on September 5, 1979, or is this just another addition to the wonderfully mixed real-fake history of the book?

[JohnT]

I remember hearing the pizza story when the game was big, but can’t find any corroborating evidence as to the specific date. The best info I can find on my bookshelves about it is in the book The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven L. Kent, published by Prima Publishing. The following passage is from Chapter 10, The Golden Age (Part 1: 1979-1980):

Pac-Man was the invention of Toru Iwatani, a young pinball enthusiast who joined Namco shortly after graduating from college in 1977…

In April 1979, Iwatani decided to try something other than pinball. He wanted to make a nonviolent game, something female players might enjoy. He decided to build his game around the Japanese word taberu, which means “to eat.”

…

Iwatani was assigned a nine-man team to convert his concept into a game. The first thing he produced was the character Pac-Man, which was a simple yellow circle with a wedge cut away for a mouth.

The actual figure of Pac-Man came about as I was having pizza for lunch. I took one wedge and there it was, the figure of Pac-Man. Toru Iwatani

The next step was to create Pac-Man’s enemies. Since the game was supposed to appeal to the female audience, Iwatani felt that the monsters had to be cute. He settled on colorful “ghosts” that looked like mop heads with big eyes. The maze, dots, and power pills came nect. It took just over a year to produce a working prototype of the game.

The idea came up in April 1979, and the project team was put together in May. Location testing was a year later, in May of 1980. A private showing was done in June of 1980, and in July the game went on sale. Totu Iwatani

Therefore it sounds as if your book is wrong by a few months.

[mobo85]

Thanks, JohnT. Since Lucky is a fiction novel, I’m not surprised that part of the historical timeline was fabricated. It’s not like Iwatani kept a journal with him. “Today I ate pizza. Oh, look at that! It looks like a little face!”