Get the latest tech news

Where did you go, Ms. Pac-Man?

We lost the female counterpart to Pac-Man in 2020, but Namco had been plotting her demise years beforehand.

Speaking to the magazine Electronic Games in May 1982, Midway spokesman Stan Jarocki explained that the sequel featured cutscenes of Ms. Pac-Man meeting, marrying and having a Pac-Baby with the original title’s hero — all in an effort to appeal to the “lady arcaders,” as he puts it. I’ll point you to accounts by Game Informer and Fast Company in case you want to learn more, but the gist of the story is that while Pac-Man was created in Japan, by programmers at Namco, the sequel was born in the U.S., devised by the Massachusetts-based General Computer Corporation. Pac-Marie never appeared in a video game, and because she essentially only exists to sell merch, I suppose it would make sense that she could have allowed Namco to skip on royalty payments associated with Ms. Pac-Man… provided that the people buying didn’t mind having a knock-off Pac-character on the stuff they bought.

Get the Android app