Eyeing the game's success in Japan, Namco initialized plans to bring the game to the international market, particularly the United States. Before showing the game to distributors, Namco of America made a number of changes, such as altering the names of the ghosts. Another was the game's title, as executives at Namco were worried that vandals would change the "P" in Puck Man to an "F". Masaya Nakamura chose to rename it to Pac-Man, as he felt it was closer to the game's original Japanese title of Pakkuman. In Europe, the game was released under both titles. After Puck Man was ruled out but before Pac-Man was decided upon, early American promotional material used the name Snapper.
The highest possible score in Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points. The first known person ever to achieve a perfect score was an American named Billy Mitchell on 3 July 1999. It took him six hours and he had to endure 256 levels. On the final level, and due to a programming limitation, there is only half of the maze, the right side of the screen contains garbage characters. Once the ultimate score is reached, the game locks up, and would require a restart.
The character of Pac-Man is history's first playable mascot protagonist that is featured in any video game.
Toru Iwatani has often claimed that the character of Pac-Man was designed after the shape of a pizza with a missing slice while he was at lunch; in a 1986 interview he said that this was only half-true, and that the Pac-Man character was also based on him rounding out and simplifying the Japanese character "kuchi", meaning "mouth".
Toru Iwatani stated that he created Pac-Man to attract girls to play the game as before the game was released arcades mostly had boys as patrons. So Iwatani intended to change that by creating a game that girls or the whole family can play.