Pac-Man creator: "Controls are too complicated" in current games

Toru Iwatani, the original creator of classic 1980 coin-op Pac-Man, has been discussing the creation process behind the game at GDC 2011, as well as his thoughts on modern game design.

"The reasons why I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers," he said - as reported by website Gamasutra.

"Back then there were no home games and people had to go to arcades to play games. That was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So we wanted to include girls or female players so that it would become cleaner and brighter."

However, Iwatani's concept of what girls might be interested in was not quite as enlightened: "I thought about something that may attract girls – maybe stories about boys or something to do with fashion?"

"However, girls love to eat desserts – my wife often eats desserts. The verb eat, that gave me a hint to create this game."

Once he had decided on the main gameplay mechanic Iwatani again tried to ensure the enemies would be interesting to a female audience. "I made the design very cute because some furious faces or expressions, girls probably don't like that," he said.

Iwatani recalls how the female president of Namco at the time was against the idea of multi-coloured ghosts and was concerned there would be confusion over whether they were your enemy or not. Iwatani organised a survey of what were essentially beta testers, which made it clear the multi-coloured ghosts was a good idea.

"She is a businesswoman, she judged from the numbers I gave her. She was a wonderful manager", recalled Iwatani.

One of the many innovations of the game was the different artificial intelligence algorithms of the four ghosts, which appeared to give each a different personality. The game's difficulty was also kept intentionally low at first, against the accepted wisdom of coin-ops at the time.

When comparing the game to modern titles though Iwatani was concerned that they appear overly complex and that their objectives are not immediately obvious to all players.

"Today's games, you don't see what the game is all about, what the goal is, and the controls are too complicated perhaps, and you're being sort of needled and persecuted sometimes," he said.

"The core game players want to have challenges, I understand that, but I think fun should be the first, most important point for any game."

Although still a beloved title, with titles such as Pac-Man Championship Edition DX earning wide critical acclaim, Namco has perhaps struggled to evolve the concept and character into other genres.

However, Iwatani's thought on the franchise's future is unexpected: "I'm thinking of a Pac-Man that's singing. I don't want to make it a musical, really, [like] Chicago the movie. The Blues Brothers maybe."