Pac-Man Fever: how a maze game took over pop culture in 1982
A top-ten single, a Saturday-morning cartoon, a breakfast cereal and lunch boxes in every school: the year Pac-Man stopped being a game and became a celebrity.
The single that named the craze
"Pac-Man Fever" was written and recorded by Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, a songwriting duo from Akron, Ohio, after they watched crowds queueing for the cabinet. Released on Columbia Records in late 1981, it climbed the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1982 and peaked inside the top ten, selling over a million copies. The follow-up album of the same name featured a song for each of the era's hit games, from Frogger to Donkey Kong, and included arcade sound effects recorded in a real arcade. The phrase "Pac-Man Fever" was quickly adopted by newspapers to describe the phenomenon itself.
The Hanna-Barbera cartoon
In September 1982 ABC premiered Pac-Man, an animated series by Hanna-Barbera, the first television cartoon based on a video game. The show gave the character a family (Ms. Pac-Man as his wife Pepper, a baby and pets) and a home in Pac-Land, and reframed the ghosts as bumbling villains working for Mezmaron. It ran for two seasons. Because the cartoon treated the original character as a married man, it did more than anything else to cement the informal "Mr. Pac-Man" label, a subject we unpack in mr pacman vs ms pacman. The full roster of characters it introduced is in pacman characters list.
Merchandise everywhere
Midway and Namco licensed the character aggressively. Within two years there were:
- A Milton Bradley board game and a card game.
- Pac-Man cereal from General Mills, with marshmallow ghosts.
- Lunch boxes, bed sheets, T-shirts, air fresheners and Halloween costumes.
- Hand-held electronic games by Coleco and Tomy.
- Bally's Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man pinball machine, the only product ever to use the "Mr." title officially.
Estimates from the period put US merchandise revenue around a billion dollars, remarkable for an industry that was itself only a few years old.
Home consoles and the 1983 crash
The craze also produced the Atari 2600 cartridge in March 1982, which sold around seven million copies and became both the console's best seller and a symbol of over-production when millions went unsold. Its technical shortcomings are itemised in pacman arcade vs atari 2600. Historians often cite it, alongside E.T., as a contributor to the North American video-game crash of 1983, though the arcade original's reputation survived intact.
Lasting influence
- Language. "Pac-Man defence" became a corporate-finance term for a takeover target that turns and buys its attacker.
- Science and art. The ghost AI is a standard teaching example in game-programming courses (see how pacman ghosts chase you), and the character appears in museum collections including New York's MoMA.
- Anniversaries. Google's 2010 playable doodle and the 40th-anniversary releases in 2020 show the brand still draws mainstream attention; the doodle is compared with the arcade original in the google pacman doodle.
- Music. The eating and siren sounds remain among the most sampled game audio in hip-hop and electronic music.
The craze is one chapter of a longer story told in the origin story of pacman. For a hands-on reminder of why it caught on, the maze games on the mr pacman free online arcade are a click away.
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Frequently asked questions
Who sang Pac-Man Fever?
Buckner & Garcia, the duo of Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia from Akron, Ohio.
What year was Pac-Man Fever?
The single charted in early 1982, the peak year of the craze.
Was there a Pac-Man cartoon?
Yes. Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man ran on ABC from 1982 to 1983, and a later CGI series, Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, aired from 2013.
What is the Pac-Man defence?
A takeover-defence tactic in which the targeted company attempts to buy the company trying to acquire it.
Was there a Pac-Man cereal?
Yes, General Mills produced Pac-Man cereal in the early 1980s with marshmallow ghost pieces.