Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.

Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians.

Thank you, as always so much for tuning in.

Let's hear it for our favorite video game ghost super producer, mister Max Williams.

Walker walk a Max sorry teenage riot.

Oh that's a cut I wasn't expecting, but I love it.

That's Noel Brown.

I'm ben bowling before we go.

Yeah, I'll tell you all that.

Yeah, I've decided on the next tattoo already.

Oh good.

Yeah, it's gonna be the third Empire symbol on the inner bicep in.

The at arm.

You know, you know, I don't.

Is it Star Trek related.

It's Claire obscure related, older scrolls, elder scrolls.

That's right, okay, you know all right, And thank you for not saying inner thigh, which I thought you were about to describe.

Look.

Uh, we have a great research brief from our pal friend of the show and north star Andrea, who I don't think has a ridiculous street name yet.

No Andrea.

The words the word carpenter, sharpentier.

Okay, I like a rhyme, you know, almost sucker for rhyme.

Nol.

He had to, we had to do it to him, or it might be pronounced sharpent a, in which case she is the word carpenter.

All right.

Uh, and Andrea, as we know, is one of our go to correspondence for all things pop culture, novels.

Nerd culture, gaming comics.

He's particularly a fan of and I would argue that this is a great intersection of those because we've got a lot of graphic art components to some of these early video games that become iconic and that really leave an imprint on art moving forward, like the Space Invader guy you know that does all the tags.

Those are basically little blinky characters from the pac Man games.

Because they didn't have that much to work with, they had to do a lot with a little and make these things eye catching.

M M.

One hundred percent.

Yeah, And that's why a lot of earlier video games are legendarily difficult because they couldn't make the graphic super tasty, so don't had to make the gameplay super difficult.

It's true, for sure.

And then move a little later, we started to see smovie tie in video games that actually had a little bit more of a look that matched the games because in the early days Atari and stuff.

You had to really use your imagination and stretch it to its bounds to make the cover art match anything remotely, you know what the gameplay was.

The et MA is a perfect example.

But apparently the Lion King video game for Sega Genesis is an example of a game that was so punishingly difficult.

It was designed to get kids to continuously rent the game from Blockbuster Video.

Yeah, and then we see another thing like, oh gosh, what's a really difficult one?

Captain Planet unfair because the message was saving the world is hard, but they did it.

Oh, we're talking about a much more simplistic game today.

We're talking about pac Man.

Who hasn't played it, who doesn't enjoy it.

It's not a huge commitment unless you're very good at it.

And it turns out, as Andrea taught us recently, that pac has quite a complicated backstory.

And get this, it is forty five years old as of May this year.

Only forty five.

I know, I thought it would be older.

I thought it would be older too.

That's just a couple of years older than us.

And Andrea did a great job setting the tone for this episode, and this brief with some still frame images from the Wonderful movie based on a graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim versus the World, and a lot of us who are familiar with this might have gotten the most I guess relatively obscure.

A bit of backstory for pac Man from a scene with Scott played by what's his face Michael Sarah where he's trying to impress a girl and he asks her, did you know that the original name for pac Man was puck Mann.

Yeah, you would think it was because he looks like a hockey puck, but it actually comes from the Japanese phrase pacu paku, which means to one's mouth open and closed.

Blah blah blah blah blah.

It is funny because it's one of those chicken or the egg things where it's like, if they had called him puck Man, would history have just reflected that and just we would just that would be what we would think of puck Man?

Or your immediate thought is no, that's just wrong.

That would have been bad and it would have been a failure.

I don't know if that's true or not, but it is interesting pac Man.

Something about it just does have a little bit more of a ring to it, and I love that it's associated with that automnopeia of the sound of flapping one's mouth open and closed, which in Japan certainly would have resonated.

And it also brings us to an excellent segue into the fan theory origin stories about the provenance of pac Man.

It turns out there's a lot of mythology surrounding the game, the backstory of the man himself, the pac himself, and other aspects of the world they build there.

One of our favorites is that both mister and Missus pac Man are serial killers.

This comes to us from The Daily Show writer Dan McCoy.

That's true.

Well are they killers though, or are they ghost hunters?

So this is what Dan is pitching.

While back he went on Twitter, back when it was called Twitter, and he said, guys, here's what I think.

The pac Man couple are serial killers, and they've been hiding their victims under a maze, and the ghosts that are chasing them are actually the spirits of their earlier victims, haunting them.

I appreciate what he's doing here.

I appreciate the commitment to the bit.

I would argue that he is inserting information that does not exist.

I would say more likely that pac Man and Miss pac Man are Ghostbuster type figures.

They're there to hoover up these spooky ghosts that are out haunting the maze, which is, I guess, the world in which they occupy.

I do love this next point that he makes though, which has always occurred to me about this game and also Doctor Mario, where he's just literally homeboys just chucking pills into the you know, the puzzle window of the game.

But yeah, we know pac Man loves gobbling up these little pellets that a little pill like themselves, aren't they.

Yeah, this one is uh, this one is more Internet ephemera and we can't specifically trace it to Dan McCoy.

Yeah.

The idea is that, like you said, no, old pac Man is eating too many pellets aka drugs, and he's hallucinating, so he's seen ghost because he's a party too hard.

And the other one, the other related theory is that pac Man is in a club having too good of a time and then he bumps into a ghost.

Yeah.

Or another theory too, is that the creator of pac Man, who has some addiction struggles himself, used this as an elaborate metaphor of his time spent in rehab being haunted by the ghosts of his addiction.

I think that's beautiful.

I think it's a little unlikely, but you know, maybe so man.

Maybe it is like a total work of art that is mirroring his struggle with pill addiction.

Or maybe it's fan fiction and there's nothing wrong with that.

We also want to shout out a Reddit user gm Caros who does a little bit of multiversal world building.

It says that we all know the game Pong Pong came out in nineteen seventy two, eight years before pac Man came out in nineteen eighty, and gm Caro says, what if some balls from Pong fell off the sides of the.

Board, which they do if you miss deflecting them, where do they go?

Where do they go?

Maybe they go on the pac Man maze below, And maybe pac Man is our video game Sissyphis and he just has to eat up these lost balls forever.

Is he Sissyphis or is he the minota of the maize?

You know it?

And he does have one eye?

Does he even have an eye?

Well, we are not the people to answer that question, but it's also you know, it's a two D game, right that doesn't have an eye in the original game.

He's just a yellow cheese wheel with one section removed.

Yeah, it's just a cheese pizza with one slice taken.

And now we go to sid Lexia, writing in February of two thousand and eight, who gets a bit nihilistically philosophical about pac Man.

Sorry, I'm playing a web based version of pac Man real quick right now, just to remind myself.

So, the ghosts are sort of like held in the middle until they're released, and then you have to turn when they're blue.

You can eat them only when they turn blue, and all the while you're gobbling up pills, and then you also want to get the little bright shiny pills.

That's what turns them blue.

Sorry, y'all, just reminding everyone of how pac Man works.

It's a pretty complex mechanic if you think about how simple the game is.

And I've never gotten past like, you know, three or four stages.

It's not easy for sure.

Again, if you can't make it pretty, you can't make it easy.

So going back to sid Lexia, who says the following quote, thus far the twenty first century has been a sort of an odd time for video games.

We've seem drastic increases in graphical presentation, and it's becoming increasingly probable that video games will offer up environments that are visually indistinguishable from the real world within my lifetime.

Yeah, we're still not quite there, but we're getting there.

Prescient and and sid Lexi points out the games are becoming more realistic in other areas to using special controls that get you know what it reminds me of.

No, Sid here is referencing we Sports and Guitar Hero, but it reminds me of especially of things like Microsoft Simulator Flight Simulator, which I, as you know, in a continuing weird side mission, I play that simulator a lot.

I know it's super cool man, and that's I mean similar controls to the way you know, flight flighted vehicles might operate to within other games Star Fucks and stuff like that, right, m.

And then we go into an earlier conversation we had on stuff they don't want you to know about the genre of things God.

God, Yeah, fascinating, which would include technically things like the sims where you're sort of this you know, all knowing unseen hand sort of moving the inhabitants of this world that you've created through the paces of their day to day lives.

These games don't really require super super, super super intense in depth, you know, high level graphics, because it's more about the interface they've designed, uh and the largeness the scale of the world.

You know.

Another good example of that would be something like Minecraft, which is a modern example of you know, using limitations to your benefit.

Mm hmm, yeah, well said.

We also see that, sid Lexia.

After pointing out these breakthroughs and the studying escalation and sophistication of video game technology, Sid finds that only one game has ever managed to really address the authentic simulation of the real world, by which this writer means the quote complete futility of human existence in the Western line.

We told you it would be nihilistic that game, says Sid Is pac Man, and our author here goes into depth, but I think we go with the recap and let's just put on our philosophy hats and maybe round robin this one.

Your individual life on this planet is completely insignificant, and it is largely characterized by the grim capitalist system that you were born into.

You are doomed to a miserable existence, which will be spent endlessly collecting brightly colored consumer oriented products.

You can attempt to alleviate your sorrow with needles or pills, but such efforts will inevitably fail.

Furthermore, you are predestined to die, and you will probably not accomplish anything of merit before this occurs.

So I guess technically, games like pac Man are what you would call today roguelike games, where the deal is that you will inevitably die.

There is a you know, you want to push it as far as you can go, you know, rack up as many points, but the nature of the game is that you are predestined for expiration.

For failure again Sisaphian.

Yeah, correct, just jump in here.

Roguelike traditionally being that it will always reset, you don't haveesothetically die.

So for example, like Blue Prince, which is a new puzzle rogue leg game, you could win, but you can't just keep playing it.

We'll restart.

Okay, so it's no wait a minute, aren't there?

But aren't there?

So you know what I mean?

Technically, You know a pac Man involves a dungeon.

That pac Man is a dungeon and crawl is it not?

It kind of very much, is yeah.

And this is where they continue and say, so, now that you know your life is pointless, you might as well do what pac Man does.

Go cry in the corner.

Ouch.

Ouch.

Shit.

He does sort of cry at the end, doesn't he.

He's got little tears that squirt on out.

So when down the stown there.

So, now that we've wrapped our heads around what type of game this is and sort of what came from it, it's true endless cry in the Yes, it's this endless loop, right, That is the nature of the pac Man game.

It is the Sisyphian struggle.

So he's crying in the corner after he you know, needs a little break from this endless cycle of you know, absolutely defeated by life.

So there is a little trick, however, that he can employ when a new level starts.

Going back to the text, move pac Man one space to the right and three spaces up, then stop.

The ghosts will leave him alone for about fifteen minutes or so.

It's true.

This is wow.

It's a credit Nobo.

So say continues when your feeling like life is completely hopeless and it is, disagree with it, find yourself a cozy little corner to cry in.

I can't guarantee that your demons will leave you alone for at least fifteen minutes, but you'll feel a lot better regardless.

So now we're going past philosophy into literature.

Right at this point, this is a weird meditation on pac Man.

I think this is fantastic and i'd see and I see all of these parallels, whether there are intentional or not, it absolutely holds, and I think it works beautifully.

Yeah, it squares with the reality of the game.

And before Lexia comes along, there's a publication called Trigger Happy by Stephen Poole.

It's a book entirely about video games, and here pull kind of dovetails with the concepts later proposed by Lexia.

Because Poole says pac Man again, I keep I introduced, and I keep using word Sisipian.

But pac Man is on this endless quest to become whole, consumed by consumerism and therefore never achieving true satisfaction.

Interesting.

Yeah, no, it's mega interesting, Ben, And I mean also considering the uh particulars of the Japanese rat race, you know what I mean?

Like it is, I can see how this maybe even would have hit home on a cultural line, you know over there, right, because I mean, like we talk about salarymen literally passing out in subways because they've had to drink their bosses under the table as part of the sort of social contract of you know, business life.

These things are non negotiable, right.

Oh my gosh, we jumped in so quickly to the fan theories.

We've got to just say it plainly.

We mentioned pac Man, originally called puck Man, was made in nineteen eighty.

It was made by Namco, and it was made in Japan.

As you said, Nol, here's what's happening.

If you've never played pac Man.

You control a guy called pac Man who looks like an incomplete pizza pie.

You have to eat all these dots inside this maze, and you have to avoid four differently colored ghosts.

There are larger flashing dots called power pellets, which caused the ghost to be called vulnerable to pac Man's insatiable appetite.

At some point, turn blue, turn blue.

Yeah, just so, And now we go back to fan theories.

I had not heard this one.

There's the idea that pac Man is supposed to be an oyster taking back lost pearls and that the ghost or jellyfish interesting.

I mean, I can see it.

The art somewhat ambiguous.

I can see it too, But nah, I think they're definitely ghosts.

I think they're supposed to be ghost I think the creators would have said they were supposed to be jellyfish.

If that was the case.

There's no other nautical themes to it, and they could have accomplished that with the resources they had in terms of the coding of it all, but there's nothing else implying that.

I think the absurdness of it, the ridiculousness, if you will, is part and parcel with the whole concept of pac Man.

It's like, what is this weird little round dude doing chasing around ghosts?

If it's not a metaphor for, you know, the futility of the capitalist existence.

I love the absurdity of it.

I think the futility argument is probably the best so far.

We can move past some of the maritime stuff.

We can go even deeper and look at YouTubers Loxton and Noggan in particular, they said, what about this, What if the game pac Man is occurring on a microscopic level inside the human body?

What if pac Man is a white blood cell that's trying to destroy germs aka the pellets and protect the host against viruses the ghost see.

Now that would I'd be down with that if it wasn't accomplished so well, no, maybe it's the inspiration because Doctor Mario would have been much later.

But that is literally what Doctor Mario is about.

You are throwing these pills in and and you know, matching them up in order to destroy these germs that stack up as the you know, the tetrasy kind of puzzled window fills up with pieces.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then these YouTubers also say, well, the ghosts do vanish when pac Man clears a level, which could mean the cell is cleared of all germs and the box in the middle maybe ground zero for the infection, which is why these viruses the ghosts come back to the source after pac Man eats them.

I don't know it's internally consistent.

Let's say that because a lot of these metaphors or these deeper analogies do explain everything that happens in the game, right.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, at least we're talking about the mechanics of it all.

I would not say that.

I mean, aren't are there cut scenes in between clearing stages?

You get a little dopamine hit for sure?

Fair enough.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think they're going out of their way, at least in the early iterations of pac Man to impart any like particular lore from.

The right exactly, not to go too dark.

But it's not as though you complete a level and then it cuts to a pixelated picture of someone in a hospital getting better.

You know, that would be funny though, or yeah, dark, maybe funny is the wrong word.

They're getting better, they're getting dark at all, Yeah Smith, let's talk about dark.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's amazing, No, not not not to be a child, it's a it's it's the name that he was blessed with, and I'm sure he wears it proudly.

Saturday Morning Breakfast cereals as well.

Right, this was a Gagga Day webcomic s NBC that started in two and continues on to this day.

Reimagine pac Man as a horror story, much like There's an Incredible Weather Garfield.

Garfield as a Lovecraftian monster monstrosity, you know, absolutely terrorizing what's his buddy's name, John Ody John.

Yeah, I require Lasagna John exactly.

So they're doing something similar here with pac Man, imagining it as a horror story.

I mean, he is relentless.

I could see him instead of having the mouth flapping, having like a knife and right, you know, so I can see where they're going with this, where people in this world exist only as giant mouth, which is a bit love crafty and able to do nothing but consume while being attacked by jealous mouthless ghosts who can no longer eat their hungry ghosts.

Yeah, and I love that reference, and technically it would be envious, but we're fun at parties, so let's keep going.

Tarker, there's an awesome graphic novel called Nameless that God that Speaks.

This is unpleasant read, but very good.

Hey, what do you think happens at the end of Nameless?

Nol We haven't talked about this.

I don't know if I need to reread it, but I just remember it's definitely like seriously fed up, like event Horizon level stuff in that particular book, like a you know, space as portal to Hell again.

A rollicking buddy comedy appropriate for all ages.

Real swashbuckler, A real swash buckler.

It's kind of a rom com.

We are lying, do not give that to your children unless they are edgy teenagers.

But we were bringing these up, these references because there is another darker analog inspired by pac Man.

An artist named Travis Pitt had this just fantastic artistic subversion of pac Man, depicting the entire lore as a crew of astronauts sent to a research facility where every one of them except for one guy, the yellow suited guy, gets murdered, and our surviving astronaut, pac Man, is then chased through the byzantine halls of the laboratory of the spaceship and is being chased by the ghost of his former fellow astronauts.

People are really wanted.

They're digging deep some of these, That's all I'm saying.

Oh well, I think I think Travis here is not saying that's what happened.

It said, another fun interpretation for sure.

Yeah, there's definitely different ways to slice it.

I like it.

I like after the fact because that's the beauty of like open ended art or art that allows you to insert your own narrative into it and isn't so I mean, because you know, let's be real, pac Man is a work of art.

It's really cool, the design of it, the iconic ghost images, the color palettes, you know.

I mean, that's all there in that first game, in that simple design, and it's like that alone.

There hasn't really been there.

Certainly have been spinoffs of pac Man, and you can play as pac Man in like Super Smash Brothers, and yeah, there have been cartoons and all of that, but when we think of pac Man, largely we think of this one.

We think of the old school, eating the pills, chasing the ghosts.

You know, original.

Speak of subversion.

We subverted the order of the story here because we're giving you the cool, deep, sometimes disturbing philosophical interpretations.

But we were telling you the truth at the beginning, folks, as we reference Scott Pilgrim versus the World.

Yes, there is a true story about pac Man, who was originally called puck Man, and it did come from the name pacopacu or the phrase.

Meaning to gobble things up.

And we thankfully saved this for the end here there's another detail that led them to calling it pac Man instead of puck Man.

Think about it, Think about some little naughty little scamps going around with their sharpies and at the arcade, defacing the side of these giant machines.

It would be a very simple maneuver to change that puck to you another a naughty word.

Yeah, they're not calling it puck fan, just so you know.

So that was that was the concern, and they change it to pac Man because it sounded close to the original Japanese name Pakuman, and the design, as we mentioned, was conceptualized initially by Toru Iwatani.

Tou Iwatani led the team in nineteen seventy nine to create the game, and Iwatani wanted it to have universal appeal to women and men, and at the time that they were working on pac Man or Pakuman, they were they saw a market opportunity because a lot of contemporary games were based on war or sports, which they saw as traditionally male interest.

And I'm not trying to necessarily, you know, psychoanalyte that was going on here, but it does occur to me that those types of games that you're talking about, like war games and drive games and more masculine games, because of the technology of the time, they didn't look particularly immersive.

They it was a sort of like a video game version of battleship.

We're dealing with like a grid or these tiny little icons and things that are sort of representative of these sporting events or war.

But a game like this that purely creates its own world and sort of defines the terms of what it's showing you, it's a lot easier to become immersive, and I think that's why the original design has stood the test of time.

Originally, this idea of a world occupied by these like moving mouths.

He saw a pizza pie Iwatanievic originally with a slice missing, and that to him resembled an open mouth.

And thinking along the lines of like, what would be a simple, easily communicatable, iconic image that could be communicated with the limitations of this early video game, you know, programming in pixel count.

Yeah, the fancy word for that is peridolia.

Paradolia, Yeah, where you see faces in weird such like the backs of trucks, and you know, the hooks on the wall look like a little drunken fighting squid.

The reason cars have two headlights largely a face on mars so on Iwatani is also saying, hey, this reminds me of a word in Japanese language, or a character kuchi, which means mouth.

Ku Chi, we would spell it here and says, look, the original Japanese character that means mouth has a square shape, so why don't I just round it out.

And then to our earlier question about eyes, he said, look, we could have put eyes on it, but eventually we decided to keep it simple.

And he talks about this.

He says, one lunchtime, I was quite hungry and I ordered a whole pizza epic iwatani nice one, and he says, I helped myself to a wedge and what was left was the idea for the pac Man's shape.

So he steers away from sports themes or shooter games, and he says, I want something non violent.

I want colorful characters with cheerful music.

I want couples and families to play games at the arcade together.

This makes more money.

Also, I got a point out.

I don't know about you guys, but being an entity that can be given to anxiety, I do find pac Man stressful, especially as you get further in right and the ghosts get faster.

All these games are so stressful.

Mario Man I mean, I guess Donkey Kong, but like all the old games, the quarters eads are just so stressful quarter eaders.

Yeah.

But the good news is this works for Iwatani and the team, so much so that in nineteen eighty two, just two years later, they create Miss pac Man as a specific explain said thank you to female gamers for their enthusiasm about pac Man, and they changed her name too.

She was going to be called pac Woman.

Mm, but instead she's miss right, isn't she miss or she misses?

Well, she's yeah, she's Miss pac Man.

If you're nasty, oh fair enough.

But is it the implication that they're a couple.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah uh they they they originally wanted to call her Miss pac Man, but they had included a baby pac Man because why not, And so they they didn't want to apply that she gave birth out of wedlock, so they called her ms pac Man, which I guess made it sound like they were married.

But here miss and Ms dot are the same thing, so it'd have to be missus pac Man for us anyway, lost to history.

Originally, Miss pac Man was going to be a redhead, but the guy who was in charge of Namco at the time, Masaka Nakamura said, Nope, don't make her a redhead.

Give her a bow and give her a Cindy Crawford esque beauty mark or Marilyn Monroe esque beauty mark, whatever you wish, and so we said.

The work on this started in nineteen seventy nine.

It took a year and five months to make it.

At this point, this was the longest development time for a video game ever.

Butthesda, looking at you, where is the Next Elder scrolls?

Probably five to ten years.

Jesus, some people, it's in.

They have confirmed it's in.

When they released the Oblivion Remastered they confirmed that it's in production, which is I guess new because it had been We don't even know where it's set at technically yet.

Right, there are rumors, but also we're we're roasting with a light roast and a lot of affections alike, roast good things take time, right, uh so apparently the lighter the roast, the more caffeine and the bean.

That is correct, Yes, yes, yes, here's the other idea.

I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but I'm here for him.

I love it.

I love a rhyme.

So Awatani is honest about his inspirations.

He says the idea of pac Man consuming energy pellets came to him from the video game based on Popeye the Sailor Man.

We get a boost after eating his little pellet, his can spinach and spinach pellets.

He fights to the finish, but he only ate you only ever ate can spinach, right, which's weird because he had he squeezed it out of the can and then it just shot up in the air.

Yeah, Karkar Kherkar exactly.

So the ghost, he further says, came from his own personal admiration of Casper the friendly ghost.

And those fruit bonuses that get you more points were surprise inspired by slot machines.

Slot machines, huh okay, Yeah, yeah, he's a man who's lived a life, that's right.

But also, like we know that slot machines are so inherently designed to elicit those dopamine hits.

They're sort of the first to market with that kind of stuff, so it definitely makes sense.

Also, the cherries and the bells and all the little icons the slot machines show on those little revolving what do you call them cylinders?

I guess that was something that also was able to be kind of co opted a little bit.

One hundred percent.

Yeah, And there's a funny anecdote about Iwatani sitting together with the team that was doing sound design and this guy, this absolute legend, sits down with the sound designers and he has fruit with them and he says, here's the sound pac Man should make.

And he noisily eats I think crutches, gurgles, and he's like, this.

Is this is This guy didn't have misophonius, I know, right, got it.

Yeah.

One of the last things I want to mention here as we're wrapping up, is that the concept of artificial intelligence plays a big role in pac Man.

The ghosts are not steered by other players.

Their movements are described by their names exactly.

I've been itching to get to this.

We've got a shadow Blinky, who always chases pac Man.

We've got Speedy aka Pinky, who tries to get ahead of him.

Each of them have their own kind of like football players, sort of flanking maneuvers, right, they're doing like plays, they're sort of like trying to Yeah.

I never really thought about that, but it's true.

They all do have their own kind of set of moves.

That's fascinating.

We've got bashful or Inky, who uses a more complicated strategy to really hone in.

Then we have Pokey or Clyde who alternates between chasing him and running away.

Yeah.

Yeah, And the Japanese names translate to chase, ambush, thickle and playing dumb.

Pretty cool stuff.

Super cool.

I it never even occurred to me that they all do different things, but they very much do.

No, it's immediately apparent now that I'm thinking about it.

Oh, and we do have to mention to the thing about cutscenes.

There are intermissions between levels.

Now, they're not that I.

Remember, Yeah, little bits, certainly not on the level of what we think of today, but sort of like occupying a similar space, creating a little bit of transition, maybe a little bit of lore as to the interaction between these characters.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, And this is one of the first games to deploy that strategy.

All of the stuff we're describing worked.

Pac Man soon became a huge household name on the level of Mickey Mouse.

Like we said earlier, he got his own Saturday Morning cartoon merchandise out the wazoo, and we're PG thirteen show.

But Pacman also got a cover spread and a hustler Pacman Fox just saying there was a cookbook released just this year, The Pacman The Official Cookbook featuring amazing choppable recipes.

Heck yeah.

And by the way, I found like a sort of a collection on Pacman dot fandom dot com of all of the cut scenes, and there are a ton, and they all have our little skits basically between you know, you start getting into the meet cute of Pacman and Miss Pacman in Miss Pacman, of course, but you have little funny interactions between the ghosts and uh and then Pacman and Misspacman.

And if you go to they're called coffee breaks actually, so if you go to Pacman dot fandom dot com slash wikislash Coffee Underscore break, you can see a breakdown of what happens in each one of these.

And I would argue they are absolutely proto cutscenes.

Yeah, world building.

We love to see it.

We love to see it here and everywhere else.

We also can't thank you enough for joining us today, folks, but here we go.

Thank you, thank you, yeah, thank you.

Thanks also to our super producer, mister Max Williams.

Our research associate for this.

Andrea and who.

Else who else who wilse oh geez, Christopherracios.

Name is Jeff Coats here in spirit.

Jonathan Strickland, the Quizzler, AJ Mohamas, Jacobs the Puzzler.

Doctor Rachel Big Spinach, Lance the world's number one authority on underwater explosions, and Noel.

Thanks to you, Ron, you as well, Buddy.

We'll see you next time, folks.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,