The Original Design Sketches for Pac-Man

The iconic classic game designs that we take for granted and seem simple to us today were often the product of tremendous amounts of thought. If you haven’t read Nintendo design legend Shigeru Miyamoto‘s amazing interviews with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on wii.com, you really should; in this one, he talks about how painstakingly the first level of Super Mario Bros. was engineered to teach the player that mushrooms were good and not bad.

In this vein, Dutch gaming magazine Control has published some neat early sketches of Pac-Man as it was designed by Toru Iwatani. Again, the amount of craft in the graph paper sketches — really love the football diagram-like arrows depicting the ghosts in motion — is truly impressive. Note the lack of teleportation gaps from one end of the screen to the other. It’s also neat to see the honing involved in determining the precise proportions of our favorite pizza-shaped pill gobbler.

Full pics below:

(Control via Boing Boing via Retro Thing)