Pac-⁠Man

Namco was making a machine for an audience that hardly ever went into arcades at the time: no shooting, no kill count, a recognizable character and a maze instead of outer space. The player's task is simple, collect all the dots. The difficulty comes from four ghosts, and the key decision here is that they don't behave the same way. Each has its own logic for choosing a target, so the chase looks like the actions of a group with different personalities.

The ghosts periodically switch between chasing and scattering on a timer, and those pauses open windows to maneuver. The power pellets briefly swap the roles: hunter and prey trade places, while the controls stay the same. The maze has no dead ends, and the side tunnels connect the edges of the screen and work as an emergency exit. From the combination of an unchanging map and predictable but different opponents grew a pursuit that can be studied: routes are memorized, and skill is measured by knowledge as much as by reflexes.