Pac-Man

Toru Iwatani wanted to make a game without violence and started from the idea of eating. The result was a maze where four ghosts chase the player — and it is the ghosts' behaviour that makes the game. They have distinct personalities in code: one pursues directly, one aims at a point ahead of the player, one alternates between chasing and fleeing. The patterns can be learned, which made the game both fair and inexhaustible.

The power pellets invert the relationship for a few seconds and became one of the most copied mechanics in games. At level 256 an eight-bit counter runs out and half the screen fills with garbage — the so-called kill screen, which for decades was the absolute limit of how far a human could play.