50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was Pac-Man first released in Japan?
1980
Location testing began in Shibuya on May 22, 1980, and the game reached North America that August.
Q 02Under what title was Pac-Man originally released in Japan?
Puck Man
The name comes from paku paku taberu, a Japanese phrase for gobbling something up.
Q 03Why was the game's title changed for its North American release?
Vandals could turn the P on the cabinet into an F
Midway also had the cabinet art redrawn before showing the game to US distributors.
Q 04Who designed Pac-Man, leading a nine-man team at Namco?
Toru Iwatani
He originally wanted to make pinball machines but was steered into video games, creating Namco's first, Gee Bee, in 1978.
Q 05Which audience did the designer specifically set out to attract with a cute, non-violent game?
Women
He felt arcades were seedy places full of war and sports games, and hoped couples would make them more welcoming.
Q 06The shape of the Pac-Man character is famously said to have been inspired by what?
A pizza with a slice missing
The designer later admitted that was only partly true and that he also rounded off the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi.
Q 07What are the names of the four ghosts in the original arcade game?
Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde
Each has its own personality: one chases you directly, two try to get in front of you, and one dithers between chasing and fleeing.
Q 08Which ghost is orange?
Clyde
Clyde switches between chasing Pac-Man and running away depending on how close he gets.
Q 09Which 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 10Namco's president originally wanted all four ghosts to be what?
The same shade of red
The designer argued for different colours and his colleagues backed him unanimously.
Q 11What 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 12The idea for the bonus fruit that appears under the centre box came from graphics on what?
Slot machines
The fruit also serves as the level counter along the bottom of the screen.
Q 13Why were ghosts chosen as the game's enemies?
They often appeared as villains in cartoons
Q 21Which US president wrote to Jeffrey Yee in 1982 congratulating him on an impossible Pac-Man score?
Ronald Reagan
The claimed 6,131,940 points would have required passing level 256, and no player has ever demonstrated the ability to do so.
Q 22Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unlicensed enhancement kit for Pac-Man under what name?
Crazy Otto
Its MIT-bred programmers had to offer it to Pac-Man's US distributor after a lawsuit with Atari barred them from selling conversion kits without permission.
Q 23In Ms. Pac-Man the orange ghost is renamed what?
Sue
Her colour was later changed to purple in a later game so she could be told apart from her original counterpart.
The designer had already tried cute characters in Cutie Q the year before, and gave the ghosts big expressive blue eyes.
Q 14How 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 15Which US company distributed Pac-Man in North America after Atari turned it down?
Midway
Midway initially built just 5,000 cabinets, and Namco's executives had expected Rally-X to be the bigger hit.
Q 16Which Namco game briefly outsold Pac-Man in Japan because its male players preferred shooting?
Galaxian
Pac-Man still ended up as Japan's highest-grossing arcade game of 1980, dethroning Space Invaders.
Q 17Roughly how many Pac-Man arcade cabinets had been sold by 1982?
400,000
Guinness later certified 293,822 machines installed worldwide, still the record for any coin-op game.
Q 18An integer overflow makes which Pac-Man stage impossible, producing the kill screen?
Level 256
Half the maze turns into a garbled mess of symbols, and there are not enough dots left on screen to finish it.
Q 19What is a perfect score on the original arcade Pac-Man?
3,333,360
It means eating every dot, energiser, fruit and blue ghost on 255 levels without dying, then using all six lives on the broken final level.
Q 20Who was the first person to achieve a publicly verified perfect Pac-Man score, in July 1999?
Billy Mitchell
Twin Galaxies struck his records in 2018 over unrelated Donkey Kong tapes, but Guinness reinstated the Pac-Man score in 2020.
Q 24How many different mazes does Ms. Pac-Man have?
Four
They rotate through pink, light blue, brown and dark blue colour schemes, and the ghosts move semi-randomly so memorised patterns no longer work.
Q 25Which company developed Ms. Pac-Man, making it the first game in the series not made by Namco?
General Computer Corporation
Its programmers had come out of MIT and originally sold Missile Command speed-up kits.
Q 26Which duo had a top-ten US hit in 1982 with the novelty song "Pac-Man Fever"?
Buckner & Garcia
They discovered the game in a Marietta, Georgia restaurant, played for two hours and wrote the song; the follow-up "Do the Donkey Kong" stalled at 103.
Q 27Which network aired Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man cartoon, the first ever based on a video game, from 1982?
ABC
It drew more than 20 million child viewers at its debut and inspired a 1984 arcade platformer.
Q 28In the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, what is the name of Pac-Man's wife?
Pepper
The family also included Pac-Baby, a dog called Chomp-Chomp and a cat called Sour Puss.
Q 29Who programmed the notorious 1982 Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?
Tod Frye
It took six months, sold more than eight million copies and is still routinely called one of the worst ports ever made.
Q 30What are the dots called in the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man?
Video wafers
The bonus fruit was replaced by an orange rectangle called the vitamin, and the ghosts flickered because only one could be drawn per frame.