Pac-Man has been around for more than three decades. This little yellow mouth has adorned cereal boxes, had its own cartoon series, and appeared on virtually every gaming platform to have ever been released.

The legend himself, Mr. Toru Iwatani – creator of Pac-Man

This week, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Toru Iwatani, creator of the game, offered a postmortem on the industry’s biggest franchise-and told a few tales most fans have probably never heard. Here are some highlights, with quotes by the creator himself:

• The point of the original Pac-man game was to attract girls. “The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers,” he says. “Back then, there were no home games. People had to go to the arcade center to play games. That was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.”

• Each ghost had specific orders. “It’s only Blinky, the red ghost, who doggedly pursues you throughout the game. Pinky, the pink ghost, simply wants to position itself at a point that’s 32 pixels in front of Pac-Man’s mouth.  The blue ghost, Inky, is seeking to position itself at a similar fixed spot. And Clyde, the orange ghost, moves completely at random.”

• Pac-Man’s original English name was Puck-Man. “A savvy Midway Games official changed it to Pac-Man when the game hit the U.S. to discourage vandals from shaving off part of the “P,” thereby creating an obscene word.”

• The shelter that would have crushed the ghosts. “I wanted to have a shelter and it would move up and down. When the ghost comes, the ghost would be pinched by the shelter which would disfigure the ghost.”

• The ghosts were almost just one color. “The president of Namco ordered me to make the ghosts a single color – red, to be precise – since she believed players would be confused that some ghosts, perhaps, were Pac-Man’s ally.”

[Source: Yahoo Games]