[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was
originally posted on 2011-11-02.]

(My Great-Great-Grandfather worked on the Baltimore & Ohio)

Today I’m stepping it up a bit, and going for something a little more dapper. Not much to report beard-wise — just a little prickly but otherwise nothing special to this normally scruffy engineer.

Yesterday’s entry was of course Pac-Man, or as they say in Japan, Pakkuman. Pac-Man was originally developed by Tōru Iwatani for Namco, and released in 1980. It was named after the phrase “paku-paku taberu,” which is slang that describes the noise the mouth makes opening and closing. Iwatani-san wanted to create a game that would attract girls to play, as opposed to the shoot-em-ups that were currently filling the arcades. He was inspired by listening to a group of girls talking about food in a cafe, and thus a game about eating was born.

Ms. Pac-Man, btw, was a copycat created by Midway in 1981, which was (clearly) even more targeted to the female audience (the official sequel to Pac-Man was Super Pac-Man). After a brief dispute, Namco got the rights to Ms. Pac-Man as well.