Iwatani imagined something different, a video game that looked and felt like a cartoon. Space Invaders proved so addictive that it not only inaugurated an entire video game paradigm, it caused a nationwide coin shortage in Japan. Released in 1978, Space Invaders cast its player as a last line of defense against marauding aliens: The bad guys marched down the screen to get you you fired back up at them. Apart from its chromatics, Galaxian was typical of video games of the era, which is to say it was a more or less blatant rip-off of Taito's Space Invaders. Pac-Man was the brainchild of Toru Iwatani, a designer for Namco, the Japanese company best known at the dawn of the 1980s for releasing the first-ever color video arcade game, Galaxian. But all the later and equally novel video game landmarks - Donkey Kong and Mario, Street Fighter, Myst, Doom, the Sims - are eclipsed by Pac-Man's gigantic, canary-yellow sun. Certainly, the novelty of both the game and the medium itself was a major factor in creating the Pac-phenomenon.
Yet no game to date has come close to dominating the popular landscape the way Pac-Man did in the early 1980s. The kids who grew up steering Pac-Man around his dot-filled maze have grown up to make video games one of the biggest slices of the entertainment-industry pie. Video games have become a part of contemporary life. Future generations will not believe it, but there was a moment when Pac-Man was as big as "Star Wars." A quick glimpse on eBay reveals, in no particular order: a set of Fleer wax-pack trading cards the classic Pac-Man metal lunchbox the Milton Bradley Pac-Man board game a 12-inch remix of the "Pac-Man Fever" single, featuring an instrumental version and, scarily enough, a club version Pac-Mania, the Official Pac-Man Joke Book ("96 Pac-filled pages of biting humor!") and yes, a Pac-Man telephone.
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