Pac-Man Trivia
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44 free Pac-Man trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Pac-Man is the best-selling arcade game ever made and the first video game character to become a mascot, and this quiz covers the whole franchise from the Namco original to the 2015 endless runner built around its most famous bug. Easy questions ask what the ghosts are called, what the power pellets do and what colour Pac-Man is; harder ones dig into why the Japanese title was changed for America, what inspired the bonus fruit, how the ghosts' personalities differ, how Ms. Pac-Man began as an unlicensed hack, and exactly how many points a perfect game is worth. It works for a retro-gaming night, an 80s-themed pub quiz round or anyone who once fed a week's pocket money into an arcade machine, and the questions run from casual player to arcade historian. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the games, the designer, the cartoon and the records, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was Pac-Man first released in Japan?
1980
Pac-Man debuted in 1980: it was location-tested in a Shibuya, Tokyo arcade on May 22, 1980, and reached North American arcades later that same year.
Q 02Under what title was Pac-Man originally released in Japan?
Puck Man
The Japanese title was Puck Man, from paku paku taberu, an onomatopoeic phrase for gobbling food; the name became Pac-Man for the North American release.
Q 03Who designed Pac-Man, leading a nine-man team at Namco?
Toru Iwatani
Toru Iwatani designed Pac-Man; he had joined Namco hoping to build pinball machines and instead created the company's first video game, Gee Bee, in 1978.
Q 04Which audience did the designer specifically set out to attract with a cute, non-violent game?
Women
The designer aimed Pac-Man at women, seeing arcades as seedy places full of war and sports games, and hoped couples would make them more welcoming.
Q 05The shape of the Pac-Man character is famously said to have been inspired by what?
A pizza with a slice missing
The designer said the shape came from a pizza with a slice missing, though he later admitted he also rounded off the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi.
Q 06Which ghost is orange?
Clyde
Clyde switches between chasing Pac-Man and running away depending on how close he gets.
Q 07Which ghost gives direct chase to Pac-Man rather than trying to cut him off?
Blinky
Blinky, the red one, also stars alongside Pac-Man in the comic cutscenes between levels.
Q 08Namco's president originally wanted all four ghosts to be what?
The same shade of red
Company president Masaya Nakamura wanted all the ghosts to be the same shade of red; the designer argued for different colours and his colleagues backed him unanimously in a vote.
Q 09What happens when Pac-Man eats one of the large flashing pellets in the corners of the maze?
The ghosts turn blue and can be eaten
Eating several blue ghosts in a row raises their point value each time, and their eyes float back to the centre box to regenerate.
Q 10Why were ghosts chosen as the game's enemies?
They often appeared as villains in cartoons
The designer had already tried cute characters in Cutie Q the year before, and gave the ghosts big expressive blue eyes.
Q 11How did the designer convey the munching sound effect he wanted to composer Toshio Kai?
By noisily eating fruit and gurgling in a meeting
The sound effects were among the last things added to the game.
Q 12Which Namco game briefly outsold Pac-Man in Japan because its male players preferred shooting?
Galaxian
Galaxian, Namco's 1979 shooter, briefly outsold Pac-Man in Japan because the mostly male arcade crowd preferred shooting games; Pac-Man soon overtook it on its way to global success.
Q 13Roughly how many Pac-Man arcade cabinets had been sold by 1982?
400,000
Q 21Which company developed Ms. Pac-Man, making it the first game in the series not made by Namco?
General Computer Corporation
General Computer Corporation, founded by MIT students, built Ms. Pac-Man; it had earlier sold Super Missile Attack, a speed-up kit for Missile Command, which drew an Atari lawsuit.
Q 22Which duo had a top-ten US hit in 1982 with the novelty song "Pac-Man Fever"?
Buckner & Garcia
Buckner & Garcia took 'Pac-Man Fever' to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1982; they wrote it after discovering the game in a Marietta, Georgia restaurant.
Q 23Which network aired Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man cartoon, the first ever based on a video game, from 1982?
ABC
About 400,000 Pac-Man cabinets had been sold worldwide by 1982; Guinness separately recognised 293,822 machines installed between 1981 and 1987 as the most for any coin-operated game.
Q 14An integer overflow makes which Pac-Man stage impossible, producing the kill screen?
Level 256
Level 256 is the kill screen: an 8-bit counter overflows, the right half of the maze becomes a garbled mess of symbols, and too few dots remain to finish it.
Q 15What is a perfect score on the original arcade Pac-Man?
3,333,360
A perfect score is 3,333,360: every dot, energiser, fruit and blue ghost eaten on all 255 levels without losing a life, plus the hidden dots on the broken final level.
Q 16Who was the first person to achieve a publicly verified perfect Pac-Man score, in July 1999?
Billy Mitchell
Billy Mitchell recorded the first verified perfect game on July 3, 1999, at Funspot in New Hampshire; Twin Galaxies struck his records in 2018, and Guinness reinstated them in 2020.
Q 17Which US president wrote to Jeffrey Yee in 1982 congratulating him on an impossible Pac-Man score?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan's letter praised a claimed 6,131,940 points, a total that would require clearing the game's unbeatable final level, something no player has ever demonstrated.
Q 18Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unlicensed enhancement kit for Pac-Man under what name?
Crazy Otto
Crazy Otto was the kit's working title; after an Atari lawsuit barred its MIT-bred makers from selling conversion kits without permission, they offered it to Pac-Man's US distributor, who released it as Ms. Pac-Man.
Q 19In Ms. Pac-Man the orange ghost is renamed what?
Sue
The orange ghost became Sue in Ms. Pac-Man; in 1987's Pac-Mania she was recoloured purple so she could be told apart from her orange predecessor.
Q 20How many different mazes does Ms. Pac-Man have?
Four
Ms. Pac-Man has four mazes, rotating through pink, light blue, brown and dark blue colour schemes; its ghosts also move semi-randomly, so memorised patterns no longer work.
ABC aired Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man on Saturday mornings from September 1982, making it the first TV cartoon based on a video game; it ran for two seasons.
Q 24In the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, what is the name of Pac-Man's wife?
Pepper
Pac-Man's wife is called Pepper in the cartoon; the family also includes Pac-Baby, a dog called Chomp-Chomp and a cat called Sour Puss.
Q 25Who programmed the notorious 1982 Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?
Tod Frye
Tod Frye programmed the Atari 2600 port, earning a royalty on every cartridge sold; the game, squeezed into a 4 KB ROM, is routinely cited as one of the worst arcade conversions ever made.
Q 26What are the dots called in the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?
Video wafers
The manual calls the dots video wafers and the energisers power pills; the bonus item is an orange rectangle called the vitamin, and the ghosts flicker because only one is drawn per frame.
Q 27A "National Pac-Man Day" was declared on April 3, 1982 to promote what?
The Atari 2600 cartridge
Atari staged the day to launch its Atari 2600 cartridge of Pac-Man, which it had manufactured in enormous quantities; despite poor reviews it became the console's best-selling title.
Q 28Which Nintendo designer created Pac-Man Vs. for GameCube as a GBA link cable demo?
Shigeru Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto devised Pac-Man Vs. in 2003 to show off GameCube-GBA connectivity: one player steers Pac-Man on the Game Boy Advance screen while up to three others chase him as ghosts on the TV.
Q 29Which 2007 Xbox 360 game was the last one the original designer of Pac-Man worked on?
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Its split mazes and time limit reinvented the formula, and it was praised as the first true successor to the original.
Q 30Which 2015 endless runner by the Crossy Road studio marked Pac-Man's 35th anniversary?
Pac-Man 256
Pac-Man 256, made by Hipster Whale for the 35th anniversary, turns the arcade game's kill-screen glitch into a wall of corruption that chases you up an endless maze.