The ghosts were created by
Toru Iwatani, who was the head designer for the original
Pac-Man arcade game. The idea for the ghosts was made from Iwatani's desire to create a video game that could attract women and younger players, particularly couples, at a time where most video games were "war"-type games or
Space Invaders clones. In turn, he made the in-game characters cute and colorful, a trait borrowed from Iwatani's previous game
Cutie Q (1979), which featured similar "
kawaii" characters. Iwatani cited
Casper the Friendly Ghost or
Little Ghost Q-Taro as inspiration for the ghosts. Their simplistic design was also attributed to the limitations of the hardware at the time, only being able to display a certain amount of colors for a sprite. — the red ghost would directly chase Pac-Man, the pink and blue ghosts would position themselves in front of Pac-Man, and the orange ghost would be random. Although he was admittedly afraid of Nakamura, he conducted a survey with his colleagues that asked if they wanted single-colored enemies or multicolored enemies. After being presented with a 40-to-0 result in favor of multicolored ghosts, Nakamura agreed to the decision. When the game was exported to the United States,
Midway Games changed their names to "Shadow", "Speedy", "Bashful" and "Pokey", their nicknames being changed to "Blinky", "Pinky", "Inky" and "Clyde" respectively.
Uproxx argues that the ghosts are really just people in costumes, based on what is revealed between rounds in the game. A
cutscene that appears after the 5th round of the game, shows the ghost Blinky chasing after Pac-Man, and his ghost costume snags on a nail and rips, revealing a leg underneath. In a later cutscene, Blinky has a rip in his ghost costume, then after going off screen, he is seen back on the screen dragging the red costume behind him.
Television series In the 1982
Pac-Man series, the hero faced five Ghosts — four males wearing various styles of hats, and a female ghost named Sue, who wore earrings. The Ghost Monsters work for Mezmaron, who assigns them the job of finding the Power Pellet Forest. The 2013 TV series
Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures and its tie-in video games introduce a new ghost antagonist, Lord Betrayus, the ruler of the Netherworld who seeks to take over Pac-World with his ghost army. Blinky, Inky, Pinky and Clyde act as secret allies to Pac-Man, hoping to one day be restored to life in exchange. ==Reception==