“Hope May’s gonna be just as productive” - famous last words. But work came in between and this took longer than I expected to finish.
Well, first off. This was supposed to be a 45th anniversary-celebration because all year long, social media has been feeding me that Pac-Man’s 45th is coming up. 2 days ago, I randomly got the idea to double-check that and nope… that was last year. And as much as I would love to go on a rant how crazy and bizarre and misleading social media algorithms can be… Pac-Man’s not that important for me to be worth it.
But Pac-Man is one of my top 3 favourite games and this was one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever had. Got to spend a lot of time researching 80s-sci fi as well as starting off this project with studying 80s astronauts-suits but preferred the silver suits from the 60s worn on Lost in Space.
Finding them too detailed and also a little boring, I turned to fiction like Flash Gordon, Buck Gordon and the Jetsons as well as just actually searching up the lego retro spaceman figures and potential references for him.
Finding that many characters were wearing glass domes, that kind of helmet was perfect for capturing the ghosts’ iconic silhouettes and adding skirts and waving patterns. Shoulder pads and arm cuffs helped to separate the arms from the torso just to highlight the original shapes as well.
And finding original artwork by Tadashi Yamashita where the ghosts were wearing the same type of gloves as Pac-Man, giving them his boots as well completed the design as well as giving me a sense of lore of what could be happening in the artwork.
A fun idea I got during the journey was to reference the arcade machine itself. Giving the suits screens on the upper torso and belts with different buttons mimicking the buttons on the machine, I got the idea the screens would showcase soundwaves in the colors of their frightened states, getting two references with one stone! And with that, the Ghost-designs were complete.
And finally wanting to add the consumables in the games, the fruits and what not. But because they were wearing spacesuits, it would be illogical for them to have food on hand. So I gave them a simple foodbox and also a key appearing in many of the games.
Now for Pac-Man, I didn’t come up with a final design until I actually was done with the ghosts. My first idea was to make him a pixel-monster but the addition of Pac-Man’s gloves on the spacesuits gave me the idea to make him one of them and to tribute one of my favourite horror-genres: bodyhorror.
So I searched up classic puppets and animatronics, from E.T to Jabba, Gremlins to the Fly and a recurring inspiration: the Thing. Trying to find similarities between the creatures, I began to daydream what a live action horror movie Pac-Man from that time period would look like. So the Thing and E.T both had a specific texture or shape to their limps which I felt would be perfect for the arms and legs.
And Thing and the Fly both had sores and scabs and open wounds. Many creatures had a lot of wrinkles across the face to highlight expressions and also a lot of goo and melted skin.
So I got an overall feel and idea, I was just worried about how literal I should take his design, especially the pointy eyebrows and the Pac-Man-shaped eyes…
I said screw it and made the eyebrows as they were, big and pointy and high up, almost double-booking as horns. But the eyes. I wanted to pay tribute to the specific shapes so I played with the idea of either skin melting over the eyeballs or holes in the face in a very specific shape. But both felt unnatural. Until it hit me when I looked at the Fly and gave him big black sparkly eyes. With natural hazel irises, weakened by his deformed shape, highlighting the loss of humanity and the immersion of raw terrifying instinct to consume. And my Pac-Man was complete.
Last was the maze. I knew I wanted it tech-filled, just like if it was in the machine itself. And I had no other plans for sci-fi technology than to look at Jack Kirby. Searching up his machines and creations and inventions, I skissed out multiple different patterns appearing in his drawings, especially anything involving circles. And I created a file with each pattern on its own layer and I mixed and matched until I had a wallpaper for each wall.
And time for the last 80s-reference, Tron of course. It wasn’t on purpose sadly.
I had found art from the arcade machine with Pac and the title with blue and red outlines and I wanted to include that here somehow. That was the original reason I wanted to make Pac-Man a pixel-monster, to give him an upper layer in red and blue, similar to 3D-effects from 80s movies, like the shields from 1984’s Dune.
But when I made him a flesh and blood-creature, the red and blue went into the light bulbs of the walls, giving a similar feeling to that classic Tron, something that got pointed out by a friend afterwards as I shared it for feedback.
Cherry on top was to transform the pallets into floor lights. Was back and forth to give him an actual power pallet but that would have ruined the horror of it all.
This was really fun to work on and I discovered and tried new stuff all throughout the process while drawing it. The artwork was in hand of its own creation most of the time and evolved throughout instead of me forcing something. I’m proud of the outcome and hopefully it will take a few years til I feel I need to create another one.
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