May 22, 1980. That’s the date Pac-Man ran its first public focus test in Japan, according to the game’s official history page maintained by Bandai Namco itself, ahead of a full Japanese release two months later and a U.S. arrival that October. The character that came out of that test, a yellow circle with a wedge cut out of it, has a design story its own creator has told for decades, and it starts, depending on which telling you catch, with either a pizza or a Japanese character for “mouth.”

A Planner, Not a Programmer

Toru Iwatani was credited as the game’s planner and designer, working alongside sound designer Toshio Kai and programmer Shigeo Funaki, per the credits Bandai Namco lists on its official history of the title. Iwatani wasn’t chasing the shoot-’em-up formula that dominated arcades at the time. He’s said in interviews over the years that he deliberately wanted to build something that could pull in players who found arcades intimidating, particularly women and couples who tended to avoid the space entirely, and landed on the simplest possible verb to build a game around: eating.

The Pizza Story, in Iwatani’s Own Telling

The character’s shape has become one of gaming’s most repeated origin anecdotes, and it traces directly back to Iwatani himself. In interviews he’s given over the decades, he’s recounted that the idea clicked while he was eating a slice of pizza: pulling one wedge out of the circular pie left a shape that looked, to him, like a mouth caught mid-bite, and that image became the character’s entire silhouette. It’s a detail Iwatani has repeated consistently enough, in his own words across multiple interviews, that it’s treated as the character’s canonical origin rather than a piece of retconned marketing lore.

There’s a second, less cinematic explanation that runs alongside it. The Strong National Museum of Play’s collection history notes that the name Pac-Man comes from the Japanese onomatopoeia “paku-paku,” the sound of a mouth opening and closing while eating, and that the shape itself has also been traced to a rounded-out version of the Japanese kanji for “mouth,” kuchi, 口. Both stories point to the same obsession: Iwatani wanted the character’s whole identity, name, sound, and silhouette, to be built around the single act of eating, however the specific shape first occurred to him over lunch.

Building a Sound Out of Fruit

Iwatani’s obsession with eating as the core mechanic extended past the visuals. He’s described working closely with sound designer Toshio Kai to nail the character’s signature chomping noise, asking for something built around that same “paku-paku” sound, and reportedly demonstrated the effect himself by eating in front of Kai to show exactly what kind of gurgling, mouth-smacking audio he wanted the machine to produce. The resulting sound became as recognizable as the character’s shape, arguably more so, since it’s one of the first things most players from that era can still hum from memory decades later.

A Slice That Conquered Arcades

Within a year of its U.S. debut, more than 100,000 arcade units had been sold, according to Bandai Namco’s own figures, and by 2005 Guinness World Records had recognized it as the most successful coin-operated game ever made, based on installations that eventually approached 294,000 machines. The Strong museum’s history credits it with becoming “the first iconic ambassador of the video game era,” a character that jumped from arcade cabinets into a Billboard top-10 novelty song, a Saturday-morning cartoon, and a licensing empire that still runs through toys, clothing, and home goods more than 45 years later.

Why the Simplicity Still Works

Compare that pitch to what else was on arcade floors in 1980, and the gamble looks almost reckless. Space invaders blasted alien fleets. Asteroids dodged flying rocks. Pac-Man asked players to guide a hungry circle around a maze, nibbling dots while four ghosts named after moods, not weapons, chased it down. There was no gun, no laser, no explosion, just appetite and evasion, dressed up in bright primary colors that read clearly on even the cheapest television screens of the era. It shouldn’t have worked as well as it did against machines built entirely around firepower, and yet it out-earned nearly all of them.

What holds the whole thing together, decades on, is how small the original idea actually was. Not a spaceship, not a hero, not a weapon. Just a mouth, cut from a pizza or a kanji character depending on which version of the story Iwatani is telling that day, chasing dots around a maze because eating turned out to be a universal enough idea to build an empire on.