493 Words about: Eating Fruit in Pac-Man
I never take the time to eat the fruit in Pac-Man.
I was thinking about this while rewatching Tim Rogers’s Action Button Review of Pac-Man because he spends a few minutes at the end of the video discussing Pac-Man’s sounds, specifically the sound of eating the fruit. Onomatopoeically (yes that is a word) the sound is an “U-wah.” The game produces a “dipping” noise that resembles swallowing which is unlike any sound Pac-Man makes when eating the white dots of the maze. The latter sounds are supposed to resemble eating because they sound like “Paku-Paku” which is a japanese Onomatopoeia for eating ravenously. Pac-Man is, above all things, a videogame about eating. The main “verb” of Pac-Man is eating. Pac-Man roams the halls of this virtual maze attempting to consume anything and everything he can, and a level is not considered completed until all 244 pellets have been consumed. Likewise Pac-Man can also eat the Ghosts that chase him through the maze once he’s ingested a power-pellet.
As for the fruit, well…they’re there for flavor.
I apologize, that joke was low hanging fruit.
Forgive me.
Players can go an entire round without ever eating the fruit, and some of them aren’t even fruit. In sequence of appearance these elements are: cherries, strawberry, orange, apple, melon, Galaxian ship, bell, and finally keys until level 256 when the game crashes. As for the fruit themselves, they were incorporated to add more color to the game, but were also inspired by slot machines in casinos which displayed fruit on their wheels.
Consuming the fruit in Pac-Man do not have any in-game benefits other than increasing the maximum score the player can attain in the game. If a player cares about points, then it makes sense to eat the fruit before they disappear. But there’s another option for motivation: simply eating unto itself. As Pac-Man consumes anything and everything in the maze, the player can get lost in the sheer pleasure of consumption. It’s fun eating everything and anything, and as ghosts attempt to stop me from moving it makes me want to find a way around them even more.
Consumption is a universal pleasure, and one of the reasons players, regardless of gender, enjoyed Pac-Man.
Videogames like Space Invaders, Galaga, and Asteroids are about shooting aliens and objects in and from outer space, but Pac-Man is an abstract game about eating things. I’ll almost certainly never pilot a spaceship that fires lasers, but I have eaten cherries, oranges, and apples. There’s an intellectual and emotional reaction to consuming these objects, and even though I rarely bother to eat the fruit, their presence is a well executed aesthetic component that only further endears me to the game.
I want Pac-Man to succeed and eat the fruit and pellets. And even if I miss the window and consume the strawberry before it disappears, there’s satisfaction in knowing that the next level will have more fruit waiting for me.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
5.6.2024
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***UPDATE***
I’ve uploaded a video on YouTube of myself reading this essay. You can listen to me read it by following the link below: