Pac-Man

Pac-Man (Japanese: パックマン) is a legendary maze-chase game designed by Toru Iwatani and developed by Namco. It first launched for arcades in 1980 and was ported to the Famicom in 1984. Players control the yellow circular Pac-Man, navigating enclosed mazes to eat all small dots to clear each stage, while evading four colorful ghosts with unique AI behaviours: red Blinky chases directly, pink Pinky sets up ambushes, cyan Inky flanks from the side, and orange Clyde alternates between chasing and retreating. Four large power pellets sit in the four corners of each maze. After eating a power pellet, ghosts turn blue temporarily, and Pac-Man can hunt them for escalating bonus points. Bonus fruits such as cherries and strawberries spawn mid-stage for extra score. Ghosts respawn from the central ghost house after being eaten and cannot be permanently defeated. It supports single-player and two-player turn-based gameplay. There is no final ending; every completed maze speeds up the ghosts, raising difficulty endlessly, and high score chasing is the main goal. The Famicom port simplifies graphics due to hardware limits but fully preserves the core gameplay and iconic sound effects. Breaking away from the space shooter trend of its era, its non-violent casual gameplay became a worldwide cultural icon. Widely bundled on Subor multicarts in China, many retro gamers first met Pac-Man on the Famicom.

These are the default keys. Click the gamepad icon 🎮 in the player’s bottom toolbar to rebind them. Gamepads are detected automatically. On phones you get on-screen buttons.

1P

2P

The NES was always two-player — 2P uses the numeric keypad, and NumLock does not matter. No numpad? Rebind 2P to other keys in the 🎮 panel.