Waka waka: Can the Pac-Man arcade game be beaten?

(NEXSTAR) — Earlier this year, a 13-year-old boy in Oklahoma shared what seemed to some as a miraculous feat: he appeared to be the first person to ever beat the original version of Tetris.

It’s possible you didn’t even know the game was beatable. It’s also possible you’ve been driven to think of other video games waiting to be beaten. Say, for example, Pac-Man.

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If you’ve ever played the game, or any of its sequels, you maybe survived a few levels of the “waka waka” eating of Pac-Man, only to meet defeat and the “eiweiweiweiweiw – wuh wuh” sound of death at the end.

So can you avoid that crushing sound and stand as a victor of the colorful ghosts?

First, let’s go back to 1980.

It was in that year that programmer Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man in Japan, where Namco released the game under the name PuckMan. Later that same year, Midway brought the game to the U.S. but, fearing the “P” could be swapped with an “F” by some meddling players, it was sold under the name we know today: Pac-Man.

The game was designed “with women in mind,” Iwatani told CNN in 2020, explaining that in the late 1970s, many arcades were full of violent games and mostly boys. The hungry yellow star of the game, Pac-Man, was inspired by pizza, Iwatani said. If you take a slice from a full pizza, you’ll see the inspiration yourself.

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Pac-Man was well-received, with more than 100,000 units being sold in the first year, according to the video game’s official website. The video game would go on to be the best-selling arcade game on record, The Strong National Museum of Play explains.

Since then, there have been various iterations of the game, including Ms. Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. A song about the game, “Pac-Man Fever” by Buckner & Garcia reached ninth place on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. There have even been television shows and books featuring the yellow hero and colorful ghosts of the game, and reports say a live-action Pac-Man movie is in the works.

It’s obvious the game is beloved, but can it really be beaten?

The short answer is yes, the original Pac-Man can and has been beaten.

To do so, you need to land a perfect score of 3,333,360 points, according to the official Pac-Man website. That means clearing all of the game’s 256 stages without a mistake, and eating all the Pac-Dots (the white dots), fruits, and ghosts (which means catching four ghosts with each Power Pellet boost).

Billy Mitchell of Florida is believed to be the first person to ever play a perfect game of Pac-Man.

“Probably my strongest accolade is that I did the first perfect Pac-Man,” Mitchell previously said of the 1999 feat. “It was quite the gala event. It was at the largest arcade in the world. Namco took me and flew me to Japan, where I had to repeat the performance.”

Mitchell told CNN it took him between five and six hours to beat the game. He explained that once you’ve reached the perfect score, the game seemingly crashes, with the screen becoming garbled. Iwatani admitted that he and others who developed the game never thought players would reach that level, so there is no celebratory ending to Pac-Man.

In 2009, another player, David Race of Ohio, set a new record, completing a perfect game in speed-run mode in three hours, 41 minutes, and 22 seconds.

Many others have beaten Pac-Man — the original and its spin-offs — in the years since, according to Twin Galaxies, which tracks video game records and provides them to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The most recent perfect game played on the original Midway version of Pac-Man submitted to Twin Galaxies was in 2017.

So yes, you can beat Pac-Man, but you may need a few hours (and some pizza).

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