Where Did You Go, Ms. Pac-Man? — Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games (2024)

Today I’m telling a story about Ms. Pac-Man, and while it mentions her unorthodox debut to the world of video games and her apparent disappearance in 2022, this is more about what made her unique as a female video game protagonist. In fact, she was (is?) so different that Namco may have been trying to invent a replacement for her almost from the beginning.

And yes, this piece takes a decisive anti-Pac-Mom stance.

‘The Most Popular Girl in the Game World’

As she appears in the classic arcade marquee art, Ms. Pac-Man is a lot sexier than a sentient yellow mouth should be. This isn’t incorrect, per se, as her in-game sprite offers her a few extra splashes of color that tell us that we’re controlling not just a female version of Pac-Man but a bit of a glamorpuss. In pixel form, she’s rocking a bow, some eye make-up, four red pixels to represent lips and a single black one to represent a beauty mark — and all of this adds up to considerably more detail that we saw on the plain-faced regular ol’ Pac-Man, who’s not even given eyes in his arcade debut. But the marquee art takes those abstract suggestions of femininity and cranks them up to eleven.

For this depiction of her, Ms. Pac-Man was given long legs that drape over the edge of the “M” in the title. She’s even wearing heels, as unsuitable as those might seem for an evening of chasing down ghosts. She’s got rouged cheeks and pouty lips. She’s got a tuft of hair to justify the presence of a bow (bows being one of the most popular ways to demonstrate femininity in old video games), and she’s got blue eyeshadow to accentuate the focus of this piece of art, in the dead center of the marquee, which can only be described as Ms. Pac-Man’s come-hither stare.

“Hey, big boy,” she seems to say. “Is that roll of quarters in your pocket for me?” As if to draw the whole scene together, we’ve also got Blinky checking her out — leering, even. You have to wonder if he knows that Ms. Pac-Man plans to eat him shortly. Maybe that’s what he wants.

I’m not saying Ms. Pac-Man’s sexiness is good or bad. The game proved to be popular, of course, but I couldn’t tell you how many people ended up plunking a quarter in because they were impressed by this character being so hot to trot. A person could reasonably assume that this Ms. Pac-Man art was created with a male audience in mind, but that actually wasn’t the intention of the people who made this female-centric follow-up. Speaking to the magazine Electronic Games in May 1982, Midway spokesman Stan Jarocki explained that the sequel featured cutscenes of Ms. Pac-Man meeting, marrying and having a Pac-Baby with the original title’s hero — all in an effort to appeal to the “lady arcaders,” as he puts it. “Pac-Man was the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players,” he said. “It expanded our customer base and made Pac-Man a hit. Now we’re producing this new game as our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who played and enjoyed Pac-Man.”

Jarocki’s statement is supported by promotional material from back in the day. For example, Midway’s official literature for the game forefronted the fact that this time around, the protagonist was female, saying Ms. Pac-Man “is sure to be the most popular girl in the game world.” But the same text also promises that this sequel would be tougher than the original, so there’s an implicit statement in here that the female gamers lining up to play Ms. Pac-Man would be up to the task — at least as capable as the male players. That’s messaging that video game companies sometimes still bungle today, honestly.

As The History Bandits points out, flyers advertising the Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet explicitly show female players at the controls, which is notable because at the time, western video arcades were perceived as being dominated by male players.

Now, there have already been detailed recountings of the strange process through which the world got Ms. Pac-Man — the game and I guess by extension the character as well. I’ll point you to accounts by Game Informer and Fast Company in case you want to learn more, but the gist of the story is that while Pac-Man was created in Japan, by programmers at Namco, the sequel was born in the U.S., devised by the Massachusetts-based General Computer Corporation. Initially, it was Crazy Otto, a purposefully off-brand homebrew remake of Pac-Man featuring new maze layouts, different enemy behaviors and a host of other changes. As was common for Japanese game developers back in the day, Namco had contracted with Midway, a U.S.-based video game publisher, to distribute Pac-Man in North America, and it was actually Midway that bought Crazy Otto from General Computer Corporation.

The most significant change was swapping out Otto for a new playable hero who scanned readily as part of the Pac-family. The game that came to be known as Ms. Pac-Man debuted in February 1982. According to some metrics it is the best-selling stand-alone arcade game of all time, beating out even the original Pac-Man.

Just having a female face on a financially successful video game should be win enough, but there’s also a political bent to this character that makes the whole story a lot bigger.

Striking a Blow for Women’s Rights

For the purposes of this essay, I’m more interested in the title this game was given. According to the Fast Company interview, the most obvious candidate, Pac-Woman, was only briefly a contender — dropped, according to company co-founder Doug Macrae, because it “did not roll off the tongue very well.” Pac-Girl isn’t even mentioned, despite the fact that it follows the pop culture precedent set by Superman’s female counterpart being Supergirl and Batman’s being Batgirl.

The next candidate was Miss Pac-Man, but that was nixed because one of the game’s interstitial scenes shows the female hero having a baby, and the decision-makers didn’t want the hero of a family video game doing that out of wedlock.

The Fast Company piece posits that it was the wife of Mike Horowitz, one of the programmers, who suggested that Ms. Pac-Man was a better name than Mrs. Pac-Man. Eileen Mullarkey declined to take Horowitz’s name when she married him and went instead by Ms. Mullarkey. “My wife just thought, you know, she’s an independent woman,” Horowitz explains. “In the progression of the animations, the implicit thing is they do get married, because they have a child. But she’s still a Ms.”

Ms. Mullarkey wasn’t the only one to view it this way. There’s a Simpsons joke about the political implications of using Ms. over Mrs. in the season four episode “Lisa’s First Word,” which flashes back to when Lisa was a baby. Marge narrates, “Well, this story begins in that unforgettable spring of I983. Ms. Pac-Man struck a blow for women's rights, and a young Joe Piscopo taught us how to laugh.” It’s a decent joke, but Marge isn’t exactly wrong to consider the feminist implications here. The honorific Ms. was invented specifically to give women an option that wouldn’t be decided by their marital status. While the first use of it dates back in 1901, Ms. was adopted by feminists in the 1960s, and Gloria Steinam used it as the title of her women’s magazine, which debuted in 1971. When the Marvel comics character Carol Danvers got superpowers, also in 1971, she got the name Ms. Marvel to telegraph that her new solo series would have feminist themes.

In my head, this feminist aspect to Ms. Pac-Man lets me view her arcade art a little differently. Sure, she might look like she was designed for the male gaze, but the fact that she is a Ms. rather than a Mrs. or a Miss lets me imagine that there’s more to her than a sexed-up image — or, to buy into the fiction of the Pac-universe for a second, rather than painting that face for Pac-Man or any man, for that matter, she’s just doing it for herself. She’s getting dressed up for a day on the job, and the job just happens to be gobbling dots and chasing ghosts.

The thing is, after Ms. Pac-Man, Namco standardized her design, and a result of this was no further appearances looking quite as coquettish as she did in the cabinet art.

And while we’d get more and more female video game characters, many signifying their gender by wearing pink, wearing bows or sometimes wearing pink bows, it took a while before female protagonists got to be depicted as outright sexy as Ms. Pac-Man did in this one piece of art. Even when Namco downplayed this aspect of her in later appearances, I could never dissever those family-friendly versions from the original one, perched flirtatiously, looking you in the eye and daring you to give her game a try.

That’s what makes it such a bummer that she’s not only been absent from recent Pac-Man iterations but in fact replaced by the inherently inferior character known as Pac-Mom.

The switch would seem to result from the longstanding legal tangle that resulted from Ms. Pac-Man’s unusual creation. Again, outlets such as Polygon have already told this story in detail, but the gist of it is that some royalties associated with Ms. Pac-Man were never fully resolved to Namco’s liking. That didn’t prevent the company from using the character in subsequent games until 2020, when a lawsuit was settled out of court between Namco and AtGames, an American retrogaming company that bought the Ms. Pac-Man royalty rights from General Computer Corporation. (The Pac-Man Wiki has an entire page devoted to legal issues relating to Ms. Pac-Man, in case you want to read more. She’s a complicated lady!) Namco has not explicitly said that it has dropped Ms. Pac-Man following that settlement, but this is what those of us watching have concluded. Why else would Namco invent this Pac-Mom abomination all of a sudden?

Some Pac-Man fans are confused by this, and I’d bet a fair number of them are simply annoyed with Namco playing fast and loose with video game history. After all, this would be like if Nintendo re-released a Super Mario game and swapped out Princess Peach for a Princess Pineapple or Princess Pumpkin and just acted like it wasn’t weird. From my perspective, dropping Ms. Pac-Man is additionally discourteous just because the character and the game marked a crucial milestone in the industry pivoting to acknowledge to female gamers.

What’s more, I really like how at least early on, the character had this feminist bent to her while also being sexy, just because so often that was not the stereotype we got in the 1980s and 1990s for any women supporting gender equality. That’s maybe a lot to hang on a sexy piece of cabinet art and political implications of using Ms. over Mrs. or Miss, I’ll admit, but to pivot from the character depicted at the beginning of this essay to something called Pac-Mom makes me think Namco misunderstood the situation. To reiterate, Ms. as a courtesy title allowed women to define themselves on their own terms, not in relation to whether they’re married. Calling this new character Pac-Mom literally defines her in relation to other characters — her kids.

To make matters worse, she’s not given even a glimmer of Ms. Pac-Man’s sexy style. Okay, she has heels, but to invoke another Simpsons joke, she looks like a Pac-Man equivalent of the Malibu Stacy doll that was given a new pink hat to foil Lisa’s attempt at introducing a doll with a more feminist bent. There’s just not much to like about Pac-Mom, especially in comparison to who she’s replacing.

Pac of the Clones

Here’s the thing, though: While Pac-Mom got headlines in gaming press when she appeared in Pac-Man Museum+, she’s only the latest offering by Namco as some kind of Ms. Pac-Man replacement. There does exist a longstanding rumor that the Japanese gaming company was never completely happy with her debut video game, either because of the aforementioned royalty payments or because she originated outside the company. Hell, maybe Namco wanted someone a little more demure than the sexpot in the cabinet art. I don’t know if any of that is true, but it does raise the question of why Namco kept testing out new characters that were essentially less interesting versions of Ms. Pac-Man. I can’t think of another major video game franchise that did this, in fact. For comparison’s sake, the Sonic franchise has introduced scads of new female characters over the years but has never created someone who seemed to be a replacement for Sonic’s chief female counterpart, Amy Rose.

As early as 1983, just a year after Ms. Pac-Man was released, Namco was trying to pair Pac-Man with a female counterpart of their own making. In Pac & Pal, the titular pal is Miru, who is a ghost but a friendly one. She is controlled by the computer and helps Pac-Man collect fruit. However, every fruit Miru collects lowers the maximum amount of points that the player can rack up, so in addition to navigating the maze and avoiding the ghost, there’s an added challenge in collecting all the fruit before Miru can.

Midway tested out a western port of the game with Miru being replaced by Chomp-Chomp, Pac-Man’s dog, which originated in the cartoon series before appearing in Pac-Land, but the game was never widely distributed.

Following the lack of success with Miru, Namco seems to have settled into just using Ms. Pac-Man, but in 2005, the Nintendo DS action-platformer Pac ’n Roll seems to be trying out a variation on her that’s *just* different enough: Pac-Girl. Watching the game’s story mode, I’m not clear whether she’s supposed to be a new character, Ms. Pac-Man renamed or Ms. Pac-Man before she marries Pac-Man. But the game was developed and published by Namco, so the change was presumably intentional. What’s even stranger about the game is that it also introduces parents for Pac-Girl: Pac-Master and Ms. Pac-Master. The latter looks strikingly like Pac-Mom.

EDIT: The Japanese website for this game identifies Pac-Girl as “the future Ms. Pac-Man,” so I guess that settles that.

In 2016, a Super Mario Run-style mobile game starring Pac-Man was released. While Mega Run Meets Pac-Man features multiple characters, Ms. Pac-Man is not among them. In her place is the awkwardly named Pac-Man Girl. She’s basically regular Pac-Man minus eyebrows plus a yellow bow.

I… don’t know what to say about her otherwise, except that the title was neither developed nor published by Namco, and perhaps that could explain how this character was allowed to exist, even if Namco presumably retained the right to veto and creative decisions that were too off-brand.

Between 2016 and 2022, a series of pop-up stores sold Pac-Man merchandise that featured not Ms. Pac-Man but yet another new female character: Pac-Marie. She wears no makeup and sports a blond ponytail. Aside from these differences, there’s not much to distinguish her from Ms. Pac-Man.

Pac-Marie never appeared in a video game, and because she essentially only exists to sell merch, I suppose it would make sense that she could have allowed Namco to skip on royalty payments associated with Ms. Pac-Man… provided that the people buying didn’t mind having a knock-off Pac-character on the stuff they bought. The items also feature a new junior version of Pac-Man — and I’ve got more on the Pac-kids in the miscellaneous notes section — which could be explained by the fact that the more familiar Pac-offspring also originated in the Midway-produced sequels, but then again the stores also featured a new line-up of ghosts, even if the standard ghost gang is owned outright by Namco: Harry (a lime-green ghost who wears a beret), Terry (a turquoise ghost who wears a ball cap), Kelly (a pink ghost sporting a ponytail like Pac-Marie’s), and Rocky (a spiky-headed purple ghost).

Clearly Namco has been trying to create a replacement for Ms. Pac-Man for a while, and I guess they thought Pac-Mom is the best candidate they’ve made so far, hence her history-erasing presence in Pac-Man Museum+. And that’s too bad, because Ms. Pac-Man was once the no. 2 ambassador for the Pac-Man series at large. Don’t forget, for example, that she was playable in the Namco-developed, arcade-only Mario Kart GP games.

But while Ms. Pac-Man technically appears in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a background cameo in the Pac-Land stage, it did strike me as odd that she wasn’t included as a playable alternate costume for Pac-Man, in the way Olimar and Alph from Pikmin occupy the same slot in the roster. I mean, shouldn’t a title so interested in the history of video games acknowledge one of the first breakout female protagonists in a popular video game?

As it stands now, Ms. Pac-Man’s last playable appearance was in 2018, during a limited-time Pac-Man event in the 2013 mobile title Sonic Dash.

That’s a fairly ignominious end for her career, and I can only hope that Namco can find a way to use Ms. Pac-Man again. At the very least, if they’re lending out Pac-Man characters out as DLC for other company’s titles, more people would be willing to pay money to play as her before they do so to play as Pac-Mom, new hat notwithstanding.

Miscellaneous Notes

Believe it or not, I only ended up writing this post as a result of Drawn Together — yes, the early-2000s Comedy Central series. A few weeks back, we covered it on my podcast, Gayest Episode Ever, which looks at LGBTQ-themed episodes of old sitcoms. Despite its deserved reputation as a shock humor show, Drawn Together actually did a decent job with the coming out episode for its gay character, Xandir, who is a parody of Link from Legend of Zelda and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII. The episode also features a joke where it’s revealed that Ms. Pac-Man is actually just Pac-Man cross-dressing.

In recording the episode, Pac-Mom came up and I was reminded that she is a sorry substitute for a video game legend. However, the Pac-Man in drag joke is more interesting than you might initially think, because Ms. Pac-Man is, in a sense, the original game’s protagonist, Crazy Otto, with a female persona slapped onto him. But I feel like the point Drawn Together is making is more than the difference between the male and female Pac-heroes is a few simple cosmetic alterations. (If you like pop culture deep dives like I do on this site, you can subscribe to Gayest Episode Ever on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.)

In looking up the history of Ms. Pac-Man, I was reminded that some of the earliest designs for her give her what can only be called shoulder-length hair despite the character’s total lack of shoulders. It’s not a great look, honestly. Masaya Nakamura, president of Namco, nixed the idea of the heroine having hair: “Love the concept. Get rid of the hair,” Macrae recalls Nakamura saying in the Fast Company piece. For this we should be thankful.

It’s curious, though, that the model used in the Hanna-Barbera Pac-Man cartoon got hair that looks fairly close to what the designs originally envisioned for her.

If you’ve ever played a version of Pac-Man where you’re racing around the maze, eating dots and avoiding ghosts, but your character onscreen has legs, there’s a good chance you’re playing Crazy Otto, the game that was Ms. Pac-Man before Ms. Pac-Man existed. It’s actually interesting to see when the Pac-Man characters are given legs and when they’re not, but there’s also a bit of an urban legend surrounding this particular “Pac-Man with legs,” because a screenshot of it was featured in a 1982 Time magazine feature on gaming, mislabeled as regular Pac-Man.

The mistake didn’t go unnoticed, and as Gaming Alexandria editor Ethan Johnson noted in 2021, someone wrote in to Electronic Games asking what was going on. In fact, Johnson dissects the entirety of the July 1982 issue here.

Speaking to Wired magazine back in 2010 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Pac-Man, created Toru Iwatani said that even that first game was made with the aim of courting female gamers.

Around the time that we launched Pac-Man, video arcades were filled with games where you shoot aliens. It seemed very dark. It was for men, it wasn't fashionable at all. When women would go out, they'd go out in a group of friends or with a boyfriend as a couple. And I realized that if women and couples were going to come to game centers, they had to be cheerful places.

When you think about things women like, you think about fashion or fortune telling or food or dating boyfriends. So I decided to theme the game around “eating” — after eating dinner, women like to have dessert.

So there you go, women of the world: You got an eating game because you can’t stop ordering dessert. Enjoy.

Technically, Ms. Pac-Man was not the first video game to try out “Pac-Man but with a female hero.” In October 1981, about five months before Ms. Pac-Man, Universal released Lady Bug, a very Pac-Man-esque title that has you controlling a ladybug through a garden maze, avoiding other insects. While ladybugs can be male (and while the Japanese word for ladybug, tentomushi (天道虫), doesn’t carry connotations of gender the way the the English word does), the Japanese title for the game is explicitly Redī Bagu (レディーバグ) and the cabinet art distinctly feminine.

Along with the erasure of Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Museum+ also saw the erasure of Pac-Man’s two children. Traditionally, the most famous of the Pac-children is Jr. Pac-Man, who technically debuted as a baby in the interstitial scenes in Ms. Pac-Man only to age up for his own 1983 game, produced by Bally Midway. But there’s also Baby Pac-Man, who debuted in a 1982 pinball game — Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man, produced and developed by Bally Midway — before getting their own game, a maze/pinball hybrid released in 1982. (Baby Pac-Man is gendered inconsistently from one game to the next, but has more recently been depicted as female.) In the revised Pac-canon, however, Pac-Mom is the mother of similar but apparently legally distinct characters: Pac-Boy and Pac-Sis. Additionally, in the line of merch that features Pac-Marie as a replacement for Ms. Pac-Man, there is also a new baby character: Pac-Little.

Speaking of characters with inconsistent genders from one installment to the next, the ghost Pinky has apparently always been female in Japan, but curiously western adaptations of Pac-Man lore either didn’t know this or changed it outright. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon, for example, made Pinky male, and that’s surprising when you look at old video games and their insistence that pink characters are female and female characters are pink. Ms. Pac-Man introduced a new ghost, Sue, as the title character’s archrival, and she’s pretty much always been female, although she’s inconsistently colored: orange in some versions, purple in others, and blue in the cartoon series.Sue’s last appearance was 2015’s Pac-Man’s 256, but I’d willing to bet that whatever agreement sidelined Ms. Pac-Man would have sidelined Sue as well.

Finally, if you want an explanation why Scott Pilgrim is wrong and Pac-Man was not, in fact, named after his resemblance to a hockey puck, read my other Pac-Man piece here.