Tōru Iwatani

Creator of Pac-Man, one of the most popular arcade games of all time, Iwatani is a Japanese video game designer. He was born in the Meguro ward of Tokyo, Japan, and joined the computer software company Namco in 1977, where he started his career in the video game business.

There, Iwatani came up with the idea for a game called "Puck-Man," and in 1980, he, along with programmer Shigeo Funaki, a hardware engineer, a cabinet maker, and composer Toshio Kai for sound and music, finished the game. It was released to the Japanese public on May 22 of that year, where it became a huge success. It caught the attention of arcade-game manufacturer Midway, who bought the United States rights for the game and released it in the U.S. as "Pac-Man," for fear that kids might deface a Puck-Man cabinet by changing the 'P' to an 'F'. Due to its innovative concept and continuing international popularity, Pac-Man is regarded as one of the all-time classic video games.

He went on to create a few other video games, including Libble Rabble, but none of them reached the level of success that Pac-Man did. Iwatani was promoted within the ranks of Namco, eventually becoming responsible for overseeing the administration of the company. In a VH-1 Game Break interview, he said he did not personally profit from the creation of Pac-Man, saying, "The truth of the matter is, there were no rewards per se for the success of Pac-Man. I was just an employee. There was no change in my salary, no bonus, no official citation of any kind."

He returned to his Pac-Man roots in 2007 when he developed Pac-Man Championship Edition for the Xbox 360, which he stated was the final game he would develop. That same year, Iwatani left Namco in March 2007 to become a full-time lecturer at Tokyo Polytechnic University. From April 2005, he had also been teaching Character Design Studies at Osaka University of Arts as a visiting professor.

On June 2, 2010, just before visiting the Festival of Games, he was photographed showing the original sketches of Pac-Man. This photograph was later published by Dutch developer magazine Control on June 22, 2010, making it the first public appearance of these designs. The following day, on June 3, 2010, at the Festival of Games, Iwatani officially received the certificate from Guinness World Records for Pac-Man having had the most "coin-operated arcade machines" installed worldwide: 293,822. The record had been set and recognized in 2005 and mentioned in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, but was finally awarded in 2010.