Pac-Man is an arcade game created by game designer Toru Iwatani of Namco company, and distributed by Midway Games for the U.S. market in the early 1980s.

Since Pac-Man was released on May 21, 1980, was a success. It became a worldwide phenomenon in the gaming industry, and ended with the domain of Space Invaders, where the action was predominantly shoot-em-up and replace it with a single, more humorous and little violent that many people liked.

The protagonist of the game Pac-Man is a yellow circle with a missing sector therefore appears to mouth. Appears in mazes where you eat small dots, points and prizes over the shape of fruits and other objects. The objective of the character is to eat all the points on the screen, time that is passed to the next level or screen. However, four ghosts or monsters, Shadow (Blinky), Speedy (Pinky), Bashful (Inky) and Pokey (Clyde), walk the labyrinth to try eating Pac-Man. These ghosts are, respectively, red, pink, light blue, and orange. In the original game (Puck-Man), the ghosts were called Akabei, Pinky, and Guzuta Aosuke. The ghosts are not the same, so while Blinky is very fast, and has the ability to find you on stage, Inky is very slow and often avoid the encounter with Pac-Man.

There are four points larger than normal located near the corners of the maze, and Pac-Man provided a temporary ability to eat the monsters (all of them turn blue while Pac-Man has that ability). After being swallowed, the ghosts are regenerated at "home" (a box located in the center of the labyrinth). The time in which the monsters remain vulnerable screen varies, but tends to decrease as the game progresses, and after many screens special points have no effect on the ghosts, with the exception of level 6 in which The effect lasts a few seconds rather than 5.

There are some breaks between some screens (between 2 and 3, 5 and 6, 9 and 10 and then every four screens) that are humorous scenes about Pac-Man and ghosts.

Besides eating the dots, Pac-Man can get additional points if you eat any of the objects that appear twice on screen just below the box in the center of the labyrinth from where the monsters. The object changes each screen or two, and their point value increases, so that two cherries (the award of the first screen) are worth 100 points, while the last object, key, worth 5,000.

The game is completely playable just 255 screens, being the largest number that can be expressed with eight digits in the binary system. Although, technically, there is a level 256, if it reaches the right side of the screen is garbled with inconsistent characters and making the game virtually unplayable. This is because the level counter (stored in a single byte) comes to 256 (when the maximum storable in a byte is 255, which produces an error of "overflow"). Then the program tries to draw 256 fruits, which causes the aforementioned distortion of the right half of the screen. The Pac-Man enthusiasts refer to this level as the "Final Level", the "Item Level Screen (Split-Screen Level) or simply as the end of Pac-Man.

In Pac-Man World is the family of Pac-Man is kidnapped by various monsters. The Pac-man's father is kidnapped by some aliens, Pooka is kidnapped by a living ship, the dog Chomp Chomp is kidnapped by Anubis, the son of Pac-Man was kidnapped by a robot factory and Mrs Pac-Man is abducted by ghosts.

Then it became a game called Ms. Pac-Man, where several said she was the wife of Pac-Man. The game of Ms. Pac-Man is also eating small dots, large dots in a maze. The image of Ms. Pac-Man is equal to that of Pac-Man, is also a circle with a missing sector, only has a bun in the head, one eye closed and lipstick.

Initially, Pac-Man's enemies were referred to as monsters in the arcade world, but soon became ghosts.

The ghosts are bound by the maze in the same way that Pac-Man, but generally move slightly faster than the player, but become slower when you activate the special points of the corners and slow down significantly as it passes through the tunnels at the sides of the maze (Pac-Man while passing through these tunnels unhindered). Pac-Man slows down slightly while eating dots, potentially allowing a ghost chase to capture him during those times.

Blinky, the red ghost, speed increases after a certain number of points to be eaten (this number decreases at higher levels). The accelerated Blinky is unofficially called Cruise Elroy, although opinions differ about the origins of this term.