It all began with a Pizza

Location: Japan

Time: Autumn 1979.

This is the story of a pizza that was awfully hungry for dots.
In the autumn of 1979, Namco employee’s Toru Iwatani was staring at an ordinary pizza that
missed a couple of slices. By a stretch of the imagination, it resembled a mouth hanging open. This
sudden eureka moment was a breath of life for Pac-Man, the most famous video game ever.
To call Pac-Man a mere game would be unfair. It quickly became an icon of 80s pop-culture and
the one thing that opened the Pandora’s Box of arcade games. Pac-Man spawned its legacy across a
bewildering number of media, including toys, clothes, even food products, and it all began with a
weird little idea for a game about eating.

What has got to do “Puck Man” with our novel? We’ll soon see it. By the way, if you think that I
have misspelled its name, then you are a victim of an illusion. One which won’t be lonely though.
Throughout this book, I’ll try to create a sliver of doubt in your mind that also your reality is an
elaborate illusion, despite what your senses are reporting.

So “Puck Man” is the real name, but with concerns that would-be young vandals could find a cheap
deal exchanging the “P” with an “F,” the decision was made to change its name into “Pac-Man” in
the US. We will then call it like that for the sake of simplicity.
What about the game play? Pac-Man takes place on a single screen outfitted with a maze populated
by dots. Our pie-shaped, yellow hero has to chomp his way around it, gobbling up all 240 dots
while dodging four mean colored ghosts: Blinky the red, Pinky the pink, Inky the blue, and Clyde
the orange. All four of them ganging up against our hero with painful consequences for our thin
cash reserve.

Pac-Man’s most significant innovation is that each ghost has a distinct personality. Indeed, that is
an early example of how Artificial Intelligence can add realism to a game. Before Pac-Man, we had
only nameless spaceships that merely danced back and forth across the screen, while randomly
shooting at you. Conversely, Pac-Man is the first game where your skills are challenged by a
machine’s Artificial Intelligence.

A ghost autopsy reveals that Blinky is the chief-brigade, a bloodhound that will be hunting you no
stop until the end of the game. Somehow it reminds me of Inspector Lestrade in Sherlock Holmes’
adventures. Very often it’s not Blinky who gets you, but the subtle pink ghost, Pinky, who is a
specialist in ambush techniques instead. The remaining characters are the most unpredictable ones:
Inky the bashful blue ghost, who goes about in the maze in constant mood swings, and finally the
seemingly dumb orange Pokey, who is smarter than he lets on and apparently doesn’t really care
about chasing Pac-Man.

Like every hero, also Pac-Man has got his superpowers: In each corner of the maze, there is a power
pellet that will turn Pac-Man into a predator with the temporary ability to eat the ghosts.
All this fun at the price of just a quarter, the toll to enter the maze and chew dots in an infectiously
catchy “wocka-wocka” sound rhythm that soon became nearly as memorable as the game itself. Pac-Man wasn’t served at home as today’s youth would pretend, but rather in family-unfriendly
institutions. Your mom wouldn’t want you to be there, and nobody would want her there, either.

Close your eyes and think about a place for lads to be with other lads, kids to be with other kids,
and early-stage adults to accompany younger generation as the private financier. It’s awfully noisy,
lots of young rascals yelling and the video games on permanent demo mode, bidding you to drop
one more coin. It’s often smoky inside, the cabinets bearing the scars of many forgotten cigarettes
left hanging off the edge, while a mean lad shouts at Pac-Man’s sad trumpet, which is announcing
the end of the game.

In recent times, the term "Gaming Disorder" has been coined to describe unhealthy dependence on
video games, ranging from playful entertainment to sort of demonic possession, laced with a
constant search for pocket money. Strictly speaking, by “pocket money” I mean every lost coin we
could scrounge out of our pockets, the bro’s drawer, and our grandma’s secret change jar.
My not-so-proud record was spending the whole cash fund of my scout team on a single night’s
play. Shame on me and whoever recklessly assigned me that job, without consulting my therapist
first!
Luckily, my parents were far-sighted on this matter as they had the feeling I needed a Personal
Computer. I gave them a subtle clue by holding on for dear life a “Vic 20” in the shopping mall,
pretending I was adrift and that was my raft. This is how, through a blatant act of piracy, a Personal
Computer was boarded up in our house!
Countless hackers and IT engineers actually started programming on the Vic 20, which introduced
the concept of home computers, given its relatively low price. I dare to emphasize the word
“relatively low price” since those miserable 4 kilobytes of memory cost us as much as a season
pass!

The Vic 20 was replaced a few years later by the well-known Commodore 64, which soon became
the best-selling computer ever, with over 10 million pieces. Much more powerful (64kb RAM!)
than its fore-goer, the Commodore 64 delivered a countless collection of games to my generation of
wannabe heroes, who are now sliding in their fifties. A free lesson in karma was included in the
package, as every game required an elaborate ritual before starting, such as loading all the game
code from an external magnetic tape, while watching hypnotic psychedelic effects on the screen.
Personal Computers also marked the end of arcade rooms. The devils of the economy left those
smoky rooms but found shelter in video game consoles, which are now making a killing in the
home entertainment. Almost none is even producing new cabinets. Except for Pac-Man, whose
fever never broke.

You can sense a bit of the adrenaline we used to breathe in those rooms by watching Adam
Sandler’s Pixels (2015) movie. There, a bunch of video game nerds fights an alien invasion shaped
like 8-bit video games. Though Sandler and his troop lazily sail along throughout this erratic
comedy-adventure affair, Pixels is not entirely devoid of creative merit. At least in the first half an hour, it does a good job: that is, it can bring us back into the magical 80s atmosphere, where we
used to ride our bikes, ready to waste our pocket change.
By the way, if you happened to watch the movie, you would surely recall the mullet-wearing
smartass named Eddie, “the Fire Blaster” who plays the role of a video game champion. His
appearance and personality were not an accident as he was styled on the real arcade video game
champion, nee Billy Mitchell. We will meet Billy again through our journey so let’s put him aside
for a moment.

Pixels wasn’t the only experiment to revamp arcade games into the big screen: a few years back, we
are in 2012, another digital character named "Ralph wreck-it" rebels against his role as a villain in
search of his impossible dream: a winner’s medal. He won’t get a medal though but will find true
friendship in Vanellope, a glitchy girl-racer with a repertoire of chewy puns. The film is remarkable
in that it takes you literally inside a video game, sparking off an aching nostalgia for the retro
platform games. The real sauce out of it is every hero's dilemma: having to choose between your
dreams and keeping true to your friends.
By the way, we have mentioned the word "glitch.” And it won’t be the last time we talk about
glitches in this book. As one of the cracked 80s youth gang, let’s say it in Martin McFly style: “Hey
Doc! What-what the hell is a glitch?”

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