We are the Ideal Pac-Man Adaptation

Pac-Man devours. That’s his one, undeniable truth. His pizza-shaped body is the result of millions of years of adaptations, each subsequent generation rounder, the mouth a bit wider, the hunger more insatiable. The perfect organism for the maze in which it lives. The top of the food chain, he will eat the pellets, he will eat the power-ups, he will even eat the incorporeal ghosts.

And that hunger will be his undoing. There will come a time when the pellets, fruits and ghosts will run out, and the Pac-Man will have no choice but to eat itself. At one point, maybe after level 256, the Pac-Man’s jaws will close in on themselves and the waka waka will stop echoing through the maze.

Every story about Pac-Man should end with him ouroborosing himself. But they don’t, they never do. In fact, they all seem to misunderstand what the character is. I’ve been going down the Pac-rabbithole in search of the Pac-lore and what I’ve found is that every iteration of the story has misinterpreted the original point. They’re all lost in a maze, chasing phantoms.

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