Toru Iwatani

Toru Iwatani is a Japanese video game designer who, while working at Namco, led the design of Pac-Man, released in Japan in 1980, one of the most commercially successful and culturally recognizable arcade video games ever made. Iwatani has said he designed the game to appeal to a broader audience, including women, than the combat- and space-themed arcade games common at the time, building the game instead around a maze-chasing structure with a simple, distinctive central character. Pac-Man's widespread popularity helped establish video games as mainstream popular entertainment beyond a narrow hobbyist audience and inspired a large number of licensed products, sequels and imitators.