What Do Hockey Pucks Have to Do With Pac-Man?

It’s one of the most famous stories about a video game character’s name: Pac-Man was almost called Puck Man. The only reason he escaped this fate was that someone at Namco — sometimes then-president Masaya Nakamura, sometimes Namco America employee Satish Bhutani — expressed the concern that this name was too close to Fuck Man, and that perhaps a vandal could alter the arcade cabinet to turn their new character into a dot-gobbling obscenity. As a result, the yellow, round guy was introduced to the world as the vandalism-proof Pac-Man instead. 

If this is not a story you learned while reading about video games, then perhaps it’s one you heard in the 2010 movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, where the title character tries to impress two different women with it.

Ramona does not find this story particularly interesting. I realize the way I’m laying this out, it seems like I’m Scott and you, the reader, are Ramona, but I swear I’m going somewhere with this that’s different from where Scott was trying to take it. 

Immediately before “well actually”-ing himself into a story about the real origins of the name, Scott explicitly says that people might guess the name Puck Man came about because the character looks like a hockey puck. When I watched this movie, I interpreted this as Scott, who kinda sucks, assuming other people would make this illogical connection between Pac-man and hockey pucks because they don’t know enough about Japanese. After all, there’s not much all that puck-like about Pac-Man. The only thing they really have in common is that both are round — and Pac-Man, as he appears on screen, isn’t even round most of the time, because his mouth is opening and closing. In fact, it’s when he’s fully round that he looks the least like the iconic Pac-Man shape we all know and love.

However, there’s a good reason why hockey pucks got mixed in with Pac-Man’s mythology. In 2001, Steven L. Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games was published, and this is, as near as I can tell, the source that popularized the idea that Pac-Man’s original name resulted from his resemblance to a hockey puck. 

Technically, this book is a version of The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games, which Kent self-published sometime in 2000 before expanding it into The Ultimate History of Video Games. The hockey puck thing gets mentioned in this version of the book as well. I can’t find any mention of Pac-Man and hockey pucks before this — in English, at least, but I’m guessing it’s not a connection Japanese-speakers would be making.

For one thing, it’s really weird to me that someone ever saw Pac-Man and thought, “Hey, he looks like a hockey puck.” Understanding that early pixel art doesn’t give much suggestion of dimension or depth, I think Pac-Man looks just as much like a ball. Or the sun. Or an orange. Or literally any round thing — such as the mythical pizza that we like to say inspired Namco designer Toru Iwatani to create the character in the first place but probably not a hockey puck, especially because hockey pucks are iconically black? Save for maybe air hockey pucks? Sometimes?

For another, there is a different origin for the name of this character: ぱくぱく, or pakupaku — a Japanese word referring to the repeated opening and closing of a mouth. The Pac-Man Museum website’s page on Toru Iwatani specifically cites this word as being the origin of Pac-Man’s name. And in his 2005 book Power Up, Chris Kohler says that Pac-Man’s name comes from the Japanese expression ぱくぱく食べる, or paku-paku taberu, meaning “to eat heartily,” but then goes on to say in a footnote that he hasn’t found any support for the idea of hockey pucks figuring into the equation.

For the record, Kent’s book features an interview in which Iwatani cites only taberu to be the genesis for Pac-Man without connecting the pakupaku to Pac-Man’s name.

But that doesn’t mean the “puck” in Puck Man came from hockey pucks necessarily, because that first vowel sound in pakupaku could become the vowel sounds in Puck Man and Pac-Man both. That is, the Japanese パックマン, or Pakkuman, could be romanized as either Pac-Man or Puck Man. The Japanese word for “puck” is パック, which would be rendered in romaji as pakku. While that might seem like proof enough that Namco named the character in a way that was a double pun — pakupaku describing the way he eats dots, pakku describing him looking like a hockey puck, perhaps him moving around the game board like the kind of air hockey puck that would have been familiar to arcade gamers — I just haven’t found anyone on the Japanese side of Namco saying that’s the case. 

Backing up this theory are passages in Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon, a 2021 book exploring the history of this character and this game. Researched and written by Arjan Terpstra and Tim Lapetino, the book cites the pakupaku etymology in a few places, sourcing it to a 2003 interview with Iwatani (translated by the website Glitterberri) where he says, “I figured that a game made in the image of a culinary environment and based around the verb ‘to eat’ could be fun.” In another section, the authors tie pakupaku to the waka-waka-waka sound effect Pac-Man makes as he eats dots. Nowhere in the book’s meaty 335 pages, however, do the authors mention hockey pucks. I was curious, and so I reached out to Terpstra and Lapetino to ask if they’d come across anything in putting the book together. They said as near as they could tell, there’s no truth to the hockey puck story. That’s why it didn’t even merit a mention in their complete history of Pac-Man.

Munch munch munch munch munch, via Adweek.

This creates an interesting problem that is bigger than Pac-Man and even bigger than video game history, and that’s the way false information travels online. Of course, there is maliciously deceitful stuff out there, but there’s also fairly innocuous stuff like the Pac-Man hockey puck story, which is mentioned on the Wikipedia pages for both Pac-Man the game and Pac-Man the character, sourcing Kent’s book on the former and not sourcing anything on the latter. Kent’s book doesn’t source the hockey puck thing to anything or anyone; it’s just stated the hockey puck connection as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. But this etymology for Pac-Man’s name has been floating around there long enough that people are just going to assume it’s correct — or hear it elsewhere and fact-check it against Wikipedia and still end up assuming it’s correct.

I don’t say any of this to put Steven L. Kent on blast, I should clarify. (I did try reaching out to him a few different ways, but never heard back and can’t be sure he got those messages.) For all I know, a credible source might have relayed this info to him when he was putting his book together. But I made this very tiny corner of the internet to explore these stories, to find out why things ended up the way they did, and whenever possible to revisit some of the often-told stories to see if they actually hold up.

Regardless of where the hockey puck story came from, it’s been pervasive enough that the people writing the Scott Pilgrim vs the World movie script thought to put it in there, even if just to dismiss it as a false etymology. But that’s still a remarkable journey, potentially: from a single sentence in a self-published book in 2000 to a major Hollywood studio projection ten years later, to a sourced, seemingly credible thing on Wikipedia that will end up in doubtlessly end up in future texts about Pac-Man, because it’s there on the page and it’s sourced to a book, so it must be true, right?

In this case, I just really don’t think it is.

Miscellaneous Notes

Before I got sidetracked trying to figure out why anyone thought Pac-Man looks like a hockey puck, this post was going to be about how Pac-Man has an obvious-once-you-realize-it connection to another iconic video game character that is reflected in their names, their forms and the single activity that defines both of their existences. It’s the Piranha Plant, whose Japanese name is  パックンフラワー, or Pakkun Flower. The Super Mario Wiki traces the Japanese name not to pakupaku but specifically ぱっくんちょ, or pakkuncho, “eating in one bite,” which is also the name of a popular candy. In addition to having similar name origins, both characters are essentially just mouths that just endlessly bite at air until food goes in. It seems super obvious once it’s pointed out to you, but it never occurred to me until someone told me.

Chomps vs. Chomps, Smash Bros.-style

I learned about the Birth of an Icon book about Pac-Man from author Tim Lapetino’s episode of the Video Game History Hour podcast. One of the things that came was the fact that at the time Namco was developing Pac-Man, the toy company Tomy has reserved the title Puck Man, forcing Iwatani to negotiate an agreement to use that name. Had those negotiations failed, Namco’s back up name for the character was Paku-emon. On the show, it’s noted that this would have made the character’s name very familiar to a brand name that surfaced later in the history of gaming: Pokémon. In the book, it’s noted that the -emon suffix is used in “old-fashioned” Japanese like you see in the name of the character Doraemon.

Pac-Man: Birth of an Icon also devotes a full page to whether there’s any truth to the story of Pac-Man being inspired by a pizza with a single slice removed. Their verdict? It’s not clear at this point: “Could this be one extended prank pulled on a long line of reporters? Or was it simply a nuance of language, with Iwatani explaining himself honestly to English-speakers, only to have something essential lost in the translation? In the end, it could simply be a convenient story, originally concocted in jest, but now sustained over decades of repetition.”

There are two more takes on Pac-Man’s name that I might as well mention here. One was pointed out by a translator I’ve been working with to make sense of some of the linguistic mysteries that video games present to us. She pointed out that intentionally or not, Pac-Man’s name could also carry connotations of the English expression “to pack away,” which means “to eat a lot of food.” As in “oh, that guy can really pack it away.” I’d never thought about that until now.

In researching this, I have found a few places that connect Pac-Man’s name with the baku, a creature in Japanese mythology known for eating bad dreams and which looks sort of like an elephant. However, the name also refers to the animal that we English-speakers call the tapir, has a longish nose like an elephant but which does not eat dreams (as far as I know). The connection here would be that Pac-Man is also known for eating malicious entities — the ghosts, who I guess could be considered kind of like nightmares? — but I think the connection is apocryphal. That said, there is a very Pac-Man-like creature appearing in Sonic Lost World called Baku Baku. The “dream-eating tapir” sense of the baku has had a healthy representation in video games separate from Pac-Man, and both Luna the Dream Suite tapir in Animal Crossing and the Alluring Rider, a dreamland-dwelling enemy in Final Fantasy VI, are representations of this character.

A pantsless woman wielding a whip and riding a dreamland tapir — courtesy Final Fantasy VI.