[SFS] Happy Birthday SFS Founder

[Robert Racansky]

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Gary Romero <garomero@sofree.us> wrote:
>
> I don't know how many people realize it, but today is Mr. David "too many
> Ls" Willson's birthday.
>
> Happy Birthday Mr. Willson!
>
> -Garheade
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.



So Dave shares the same birthday as Pac Man... >)


http://www.wired.com/2015/05/pac-man-35th-anniversary/

Pac-Man Turns 35 Today. So Here, Have Some Nostalgia

Chris Kohler
05.22.15  ,  6:30 am

Pac-Man, the biggest arcade game of all time, turns 35 today. Here’s a
look back at the era when Pac-Man fever ruled the world.

Released by the Japanese company Namco on May 22, 1980, Pac-Man was
like nothing else at the time. At a time when Space Invaders and
Asteroids and other games with abstracted, monochrome graphics ruled
the arcade, Pac-Man offered a colorful cartoonish design with an
appealing central character. It revolved around eating, not shooting;
and it was designed to appeal to young women and couples, not dudes in
sketchy bowling-alley bars (although they all played it too).

The colorful design and unique collect-the-dots maze gameplay—plus the
wonderful tension of running away from those darned ghosts, then
scrambling to eat them once you got a power pellet—made Pac-Man almost
instantly addictive, eating quarters as rapaciously as its protagonist
swallowed pixels. By one count, Namco sold 400,000 Pac-Man machines,
head and shoulders above anything that had come before, or since. And
it’s still highly playable and popular in a way its contemporaries are
not—few people are paying for Asteroids or Space Invaders updates
today, but Namco Bandai still makes and sells variations on Pac-Man on
every platform imaginable.

But Pac-Man was more than a hit game. It was a genuine cultural
inflection point. Everywhere you looked, there was Pac-Man: On boxes
of breakfast cereal, on television, even on the radio. It marked the
first time a particular videogame and its iconography became as
culturally relevant as a hit TV show or movie. The era of abstract
Pong paddles and blocky spaceships was over—it was lovable characters
like Pac that were going to be the face of games from now on. Pac-Man
was gaming’s first true franchise, in a way that most successful games
today spawn spin-offs and sequels.

Pac-Man’s ubiquity was our first indication that games were about to
become the dominant entertainment medium of the information age. (It
also arguably marked the beginning of Japan’s impending pop-cultural
invasion of the rest of the world, even if players at the time didn’t
know where it came from.)

And we’re all really going to feel old in 5 years when Pac turns 40.