Pac Man game turns 30 [Link to play Pacman game]

PacmanSHOOT: Shucks, I was 8 years old when this game came along. Such fun, along with Asteroids, Space Invaders, and then the whole Atari craze. And look where we are now. The gaming thing has grown unabated since these first incarnations...Wanna play, click here.

clipped from videogames.yahoo.com If you're anything like us, it's pumping quarters into the Pac-Man machine in the corner of your local diner -- then nagging Mom or Dad for more when you ran out. And if that's the case, get ready for a shock: the classic arcade game celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. Makes you feel old, huh? This might be little consolation, but you're not the only one. Pac-Man -- created, as legend would have it, when Namco's Toru Iwatani caught sight of a pizza with a slice missing -- is the most recognizable character in the whole of video game history, with as many as 94% of US consumers able to recognize the ever-hungry yellow blob. "Many games at the time when Pac-Man was originally released had very simple behavior for the enemy characters in the games," he told us. "Pac-Man’s enemy AI for the ghosts was revolutionary in that each was specifically programmed to have a different behavior or personality so they each reacted to Pac-Man differently.