March 27, 1982: Pac-Man Fever

March 27, 1982: "Pac-Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia hits Number 9 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100. But this post is only a little about the song, and more about the phenomenon that inspired it.

As Time magazine put it: 

Pac-Man is bursting out all over. Not only has the 15-month-old arcade game swallowed up an estimated $1 billion in quarters to become the hottest item in the video-game market, but the little yellow creature is now invading homes and spawning nearly 200 offshoots ranging from jeans to a chart-busting pop song, "Pac-Man Fever."

Pac-Man is a pie-shaped yellow figure that scores points in a video game by gobbling up dots, colorful fruits and four ghosts that inhabit its mazy world. Pac-Man, however, wilts and vanishes when one of the ghosts eats it. The game was originally developed in Japan and is based on a ravenous folk character whose appetite could never be appeased. The name comes from pahu, the Japanese word for "to eat."

Retailers have been unable to keep Pac-Man cartridges on their shelves since the Atari division of Warner Communications Inc. introduced the home version in mid-March (list price: $37.95). Richard Simon, an analyst with Wall Street's Goldman, Sachs & Co., expects Atari to sell a phenomenal 9 million units this year and to take in some $200 million in the process. He predicts that Atari's Pac-Man earnings will ultimately surpass 20th Century-Fox's profits from Star Wars, the bestselling film ever made.

Another big scorer will be Bally Manufacturing Corp.'s Midway subsidiary. It has sold more than 96,000 Pac-Man arcade games under a licensing arrangement with Namco Ltd. of Japan, and also holds royalty rights to virtually all Pac-Man spinoffs. Coleco Industries of Hartford, Conn., has come out with a battery-run table-top model, while Milton Bradley Co. will be offering a puzzle, a card game and a nonelectronic Pac-Man board game. In addition to a parade of toys, pajamas, lunch boxes and bumper stickers, there will be Hallmark cards and gift wrapping, Dan River sheets and pillowcases and J.C. Penney children's clothing. Says Midway Vice President Stanley Jarocki: "I think we have the Mickey Mouse of the 1980s."

Columbia Records' Pac-Man Fever (sample lyric: "I've got Pac-Man fever/ I'm goin' out of my mind") was No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 last week. Book publishers are weighing in with works like Signet's 128-page paperback guide, Mastering Pac-Man, which has put in an appearance on the New York Times bestseller list, and Pocket Books' How to Win at Pac-Man. Meanwhile, Bally last week introduced the first model of a Pac-Man pinball machine. The company hopes it will revive interest in pinballs, which has been all but eaten away by video games like Pac-Man.

Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia were from Akron, Ohio, and had been recording music together, mostly novelty songs and commercial jingles, since 1972. Garcia died in 2011. As of March 27, 2022, Buckner is still alive and actively writing songs.

Kids today, they don't understand the phenomenon of arcade games, and Pac-Man in particular. There has been no game since that has approached it in popularity. No, not any game in the Mario franchise (Donkey Kong had debuted the preceding July), not any game in the Halo or Grand Theft Auto franchises, not any game that could later be played on GameBoy, PlayStation or Xbox.

Kids today, they don't get that their Xbox games and other computer games are descended from the Atari 2600 and 5200, Mattel Intellivision, and ColecoVision; with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sony PlayStation in between. They don't know the pain of saving up the $197 to get the Atari 5200 at Crazy Eddie or Toys R Us, and the $35 to get a new game cartridge. Hell, they don't know about Crazy Eddie and their commercials about how "his prices are in-sane!" And Toys R Us has been gone for a few years, too.

And they don't know about the arcades that inspired those home video games, most of them in shopping malls, with names like Space Port and Fun-n-Games. There were lines to play Pac-Man at video arcades. No, I am not making that up. I stood on such lines.

They don't know the thrill of hearing the Pac-Man theme, or escaping the ghosts, or eating the "power pill," which made the ghosts edible and worth bonus points, instead of being deadly to touch. They don't know the thrill of developing a "Pac-Man pattern," a "solution" to the game, to get you to the next level. They don't know the thrill of hearing that bell each time you racked up another 10,000 points, earning a "bonus life."

When my nieces were younger, I had to tell them:

When I was your age, we didn't have kids sitting around getting fat playing video games. We actually had to go out and play. Act out the scenes of sports, and war, and cops & robbers, that you might now see in video games. And if we wanted to play video games, we had to leave the house, get on our bicycles, ride to the mall, and go into the arcade.

"Uncle Mike, what's an arcade?"

It was a store with video game consoles.

"Uncle Mike, what's a console?"

It was a machine with the video game inside, put on... how can I describe this... a TV screen. We used to call the old TV sets "consoles," too. We'd stick a quarter in, and play the game. Some games were so popular, there'd be a line. Some guys would set themselves up as the next guy to play by putting their quarter on the machine. And the quarter, and the place in line it represented, was respected: Nobody dared slip it into their pocket.

"Uncle Mike, what's a quarter?"

Yer killin' me here...

25 cents in 1982, with inflation factored in, would be worth about 76 cents in 2022 dollars. That's a shade over 3 quarters. Today, there are "retro arcades," or "yestercades," usually in hipsterish towns, and they tend to charge 50 cents, or 2 quarters for 1 play.

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March 27, 1982 was a Saturday. Steven Pienaar, who captained South Africa to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup, was born on this day.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 5 games in the NBA:

* The New Jersey Nets lost to the Detroit Pistons, 123-121 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. Rudy Williams scored 39 points in defeat for the Nets.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Dallas Mavericks, 96-85 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.

* The Denver Nuggets beat the Phoenix Suns, 140-134 in double overtime at the McNichols Arena in Denver. Despite the high school, the game's leading scorer was Alex English of the Nuggets, with 29.

* The San Antonio Spurs beat the Utah Jazz, 114-110 at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah. George Gervin scored 47 points for the Spurs.

* And the Milwaukee Bucks beat the San Diego Clippers, 128-99 at the San Diego Sports Arena (now the Pechanga Arena).

There were 8 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Islanders beat the Hartford Whalers, 5-4 at the Nassau Coliseum.

* The Montreal Canadiens beat their Provincial rivals, the Quebec Nordiques, 4-2 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Boston Bruins, 6-5 at the Boston Garden.

* The Philadelphia Flyers and the Washington Capitals played to a tie, 4-4 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* In an "Original Six" matchup, the Detroit Red Wings beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 2-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

* The Chicago Black Hawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins played to a tie, 3-3 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* The Los Angeles Kings beat the Colorado Rockies, 9-4 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

* The Vancouver Canucks beat the Calgary Flames, 7-2 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.

* And the New York Rangers, the St. Louis Blues, the Buffalo Sabres, the Edmonton Oilers and the Winnipeg Jets were not scheduled.

And in English soccer, Arsenal beat Birmingham team Aston Villa, 4-3 at the Arsenal Stadium, a.k.a. Highbury, in North London.