The Spanish Games & Interactive Entertainment Conference Gamelab will grant Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator, the Legend Award for his lifetime achievements. Pac-Man, the title he developed back in 1980, is one of the most succesful games in history, and its innovations shaped electronic entertainment as we know it. Countless prestigious institutions have recognized its weight in contemporary culture, as the Museum of Modern Art of New York did when it picked Pac-Man as one of the first video games to be included in its permanent collection.
“Mr. Toru Iwatani is much more than a game designer: he created one of the most important pop culture icons of our time”, said Mr. Iván Fernández Lobo, Founder and Director of Gamelab. Mr. Iwatani joins a long list of prestigious names awarded by Gamelab. Apart from being a key designer of video games history, Mr. Toru Iwatani is also a pioneer in video games specialized training in Japanese university. That is why Professor Iwatani will join a panel in Gamelab about training in the area of game development, along with prominent representatives from the gaming industry and the academic world. In Spain, this training field is growing in importance and it has become in a key factor for sector development, as well as a really important appeal for foreign investors, above all in Barcelona.
Toru Iwatani (Japan, 1950) wanted to develop a game without violence and with a friendly mascot that could attract all kind of users to video arcades and open video games to female and family public. He came up with the idea for Pac-Man while eating pizza: when he took the first slice, the remaining shape remembered him the cartoon of a human face and the japanese kanji (ideogram) that means “mouth”. Its name, Pac-Man, is derived from the japanese onomatopoeia paku paku that represents eating.
Toru Iwatani career as a game developer started in Namco in 1977. Three years after that he became famous with Pac-Man, an almost instant success: in just a year and a half more than 350.000 arcade machines with the game were sold — the hit provided earnings for a value of 2.4 billion $. By the end of the 20th Century, Twin Galaxies considered it the most profitable game of all time; Guiness Book of Records awarded it as the most successful arcade machine ever created.
Pac-Man is such an iconic character that, even after all these years, it’s as attractive and culturally powerful as ever, as evidenced by the upcoming movie Pixels where it’s going to appear not only Pac-Man, but Mr. Toru Iwatani as well (as a character performed by actor Denis Akiyama). Pac-Man is considered one of the most influential games of all time because of its innovative nature: experts claim that you can find its mark even in unlikely games such as GTA by Rockstar. Iwatani developed up to 50 more games for Namco such as Ridge Racer and Time Crisis. In the 90s, he was promoted to a management position in Namco until he retired in 2007 to become a full-time lecturer at Tokyo Polytechnic University. He is also director of the Digital Games Research Association Japan, fellow of Namco Bandai Games. He wrote the book about development Pac-Man’s Methods, published by Enter Brain.
The Spanish Games & Interactive Entertainment Conference Gamelab will be hold in Barcelona this June 24 – 26.
Source: Gamelab
