Know Your amiibo! Pac-Man

The Nintendo amiibo Collection is one that speaks both the legacy and story of each character. In each week’s Know Your amiibo, we delve into the back story, as well as, trivia of one particularly lucky amiibo.

This week’s amiibo will be the world renown Pac-Man. Though the amiibo belonged to the Super Smash Bros. series, and appears as its Pac-Man World look, Pac-Man goes way back to even before the time of Mario.

History

Pac-Man was first introduced as an arcade game in 1980, a year before Mario even appeared in the first Donkey Kong arcade game. When originally released, it was named Puck Man due to its hockey puck shape but was later changed to Pac-Man due to vandalism of the letter P in Puck on multiple arcade machines. Though the game was not expected by the developers to be popular initially, it went on to become an instant hit in arcades, eating up not only countless yellow pellets on the screen but also an uncountable amount of quarters in real life.

The premise of the game was simple, clear the level by leading Pac-Man around the maze and eating up all the yellow pellets on the screen while, at the same time, avoiding all 4 ghost. The game was intended to run on forever as long as the player has lives left, but due to the nature of 8-bit computing, the game experiences a “kill screen” on the 256th level, making the right side of the game a garbled mess and unfinishable.

Though the game was not expected by the developers to be popular initially, it went on to become an instant hit in arcades, eating up not only countless yellow dots on the screen but also an uncountable amount of quarters in real life. In its more than three decades of life, Pac-Man appeared in a large lineup of sequels and spin-offs, across a large collection of devices from the iPod Classic to the PlayStation 4.

Smash Appearance

Pac-Man’s appearance in Super Smash Bros. Wii U/3DS can be attributed to his overwhelming popularity. Though Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto originally pitched the idea back in Brawl, Series Director Masahiro Sakurai thought that he would not fit well within the roster. Though he eventually changed his mind and included it in the Wii U/3DS game, he made it clear that he would consider dropping Pac-man should he be forced to use Pac-Man’s “Ghostly Adventures” look.

The amiibo

The amiibo was first released in April 2015 alongside the rest of the fourth wave Smash amiibo figures. The figure is generally well made and had some weight to it. Though due to its round and smooth nature, it was harder to conceal the weld lines. In Smash, the Pac-Man amiibo can be used to bring in a trainable CPU opponent. Players can train the CPU opponent up to a maximum level of 50 and can save it back onto the amiibo to bring it along wherever they went.

The Pac-Man amiibo can also be used in a variety of games outside of Smash, notable uses include Mario Kart 8, Ace Combat 3D+ and Super Mario Maker, unlocking character skins and costumes in all of them.

Info

Name: Pac-Man
amiibo Series: Super Smash Bros.
Franchise: Pac-Man
Released: April 2015
For more about the Super Smash Bros. Pac-Man amiibo, visit the Official Nintendo web page