TODAY'S REVIEW Namco · 1980

Pac-Man,
the maze everyone was allowed to lose

Every other cabinet in the room punished you for being new. This one let a beginner stay on the screen long enough to want a second try, and the people who stayed are the ones who still remember it.

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A Pac-Man arcade cabinet standing in a cafe
Photo by YosemiteYamper, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

One review at a time,
not a list of thousands

Search for the games you played and you get tens of thousands of entries, most of them a screenshot and a download link. We take one machine at a time: what the design actually did, and what it meant to stand in front of it.

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The designChecked factsWhat it meant thenPlaying it now