Best Ever
Arcade Game?

Here’s what you need to know about Pac-Man: eat the dots, avoid the ghosts. A child understands this in seconds. The rules never change. The maze is visible in its entirety. And yet it took Billy Mitchell until 1999—eighteen years after the game’s release—to achieve a perfect score.

That gap between instant understanding and near-impossible mastery is the whole game.

Before Pac-Man, video games were about shooting things. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaxian—the arcade was a gallery of destruction. Toru Iwatani, a twenty-four-year-old Namco designer, thought this was a problem. He wanted something that would appeal to everyone. He wanted a game about eating instead of killing. He looked at a pizza with a slice missing and saw a character.

The genius is legibility. You grasp the objective immediately: clear the maze, don’t get caught. But the ghosts—Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde—aren’t random. Each has a distinct AI pattern. Blinky chases directly. Pinky tries to get ahead of you. Inky’s targeting is erratic, partly based on Blinky’s position. Clyde alternates between pursuit and retreat. Learning these patterns, exploiting their blind spots, threading the maze with optimal efficiency—this is where the depth lives, invisible until you look for it.

The power pellet is the game’s masterstroke. For a few seconds after eating one, the ghosts turn blue and flee. The hunter becomes the hunted. It’s a complete emotional reversal, a burst of agency in a game that otherwise keeps you defensive. And crucially, it’s temporary. The ghosts start flashing, warning you the window is closing, and then the predation resumes. Fear, power, fear. The rhythm is as elegant as anything in game design.

The maze itself is deceptively sophisticated. The tunnels on either side let Pac-Man wrap around, providing escape routes. The center box where ghosts regenerate creates constant danger. The power pellets in each corner encourage you to visit every quadrant rather than camping. Every element serves gameplay while maintaining visual clarity. Nothing is decorative. Everything is designed.

Wakka wakka wakka. That sound—Pac-Man eating dots—is instantly recognizable forty-five years later. The rising pitch when you eat a ghost. The death spiral. The intermission music. Every audio element reinforces the game’s personality: cheerful, frantic, compulsive. You can hear Pac-Man across an arcade floor and know exactly what’s happening.

Perfect Pac-Man—eating every dot, every pellet, every fruit, and every blue ghost across all 256 levels until the game crashes from a buffer overflow—requires not just skill but devotion. The game was deep enough to sustain nearly two decades of optimization, and players still find new patterns, new efficiencies, new ways to shave frames. The simplicity is a surface. Underneath, there’s a system worth a lifetime.

Level 256 ends in a kill screen, a glitch that corrupts half the maze—proof that even perfect designs have limits. But that’s 255 levels of earned mastery before the system finally breaks. Most of us will never see it. The pursuit is the point.

Iwatani looked at a pizza and saw a mouth. Forty-five years later, that mouth is still eating, and we’re still watching, and somehow neither of us is bored yet.

Namco: The Best Ever is simplicity hiding infinity. Is Pac-Man the Best Ever Arcade Game? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Arcade1Up Deluxe Cabinet is the best home approximation of the original experience.
• Pac-Man Championship Edition DX modernized the formula brilliantly—same DNA, new mutations.