Pac-Man

Ghosts alternate between chase and scatter phases on a timer, retreating to their home corners during scatter. Learning these cycles is the foundation of pattern play.

Original platform: upright arcade cabinet with a four-way joystick and no buttons.; Maze: a single fixed layout containing 240 dots and 4 power pellets.; Ghosts: Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (cyan) and Clyde (orange), each with distinct pursuit behaviour.

Clear the maze by eating every dot and power pellet. Doing so advances to the next level, which uses the same maze at higher difficulty.

The four ghosts are not random. Each uses a distinct targeting rule, which is why the game is learnable rather than luck-based: Blinky pursues Pac-Man directly, and speeds up as dots are eaten.; Pinky targets ahead of Pac-Man rather than at him.; Inky uses both Pac-Man's position and Blinky's, ma...

There is no win condition in the usual sense. The original arcade game has a level 256 "kill screen", where an integer overflow corrupts half the maze and makes it impossible to complete — which is the de facto end of the game and the basis of the perfect-score record.

No federation governs Pac-Man. Competition is defined by record-keeping conventions: Which build: original arcade ROM versus later ports, which differ in ghost behaviour and timing.; Perfect score: the recognised maximum on the original arcade game, achieved by eating every available point throug...

The four ghosts are not random. Each uses a distinct targeting rule, which is why the game is learnable rather than luck-based: Blinky pursues Pac-Man directly, and speeds up as dots are eaten.; Pinky targets ahead of Pac-Man rather than at him.; Inky uses both Pac-Man's position and Blinky's, ma...