Pac-Man (character) - Character Design

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 character's name was originally Puck-Man, This 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, meaning to open and close ones mouth. When Namco licenced the game to be released in the The United States, they changed the game and character's name to "Pac-Man" after fearing that vandals would change the P in Puck to an F.

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.