In the English arcade version of the game, Pinky is known as “Speedy” which many believe is a mistake, since Blinky is the only ghost who can travel faster than the player.
Interestingly, because Pinky is programmed to always be ahead of Pac-Man, you can usually make her stop chasing you by heading straight for her. However, due to “overflow error” in the game’s code, if Pac-Man is facing upwards, Pinky will instead attempted to land on the space 4 tiles in front of him and 4 tiles to the left. The Pink ghost, known as Pinky, is programmed to try and land on the space 16 pixels (or two tiles in front) of Pac-Man to ambush him. In the Japanese version, his personality is described as “ oikake” which roughly translates to “ chaser“. In the original arcade game, Blinky’s official name is “ Shadow” alluding to the fact that he is almost always right behind the player. Blinky will momentarily cease being Cruise Elroy whenever the player loses a life.Īs for where the name Cruise Elroy comes from, despite being ingrained as part of Pac-Man lore, nobody seems to know. The exact number of dots you need to consume for Blinky to become Cruise Elroy depends on which level you’re currently playing, with the overall number dropping the further you get into the game to the point that he will assume Cruise Elroy form when there are still 60 dots left on screen. Put simply, Blinky is programmed to target whichever tile Pac-Man currently occupies, giving the illusion that he’s chasing the player. As the game progresses, Blinky’s speed increases to the point that he becomes marginally faster than Pac-Man at which point he becomes what fans refer to as “Cruise Elroy”.
In regards to Blinky, along with being the only ghost to actively pursue Pac-Man directly in-game, he’s also the only ghost not to begin each round inside the small holding pen in the middle of the screen (known by fans as “the ghost house”). You see, the Pac-Man game-board is normally separated into a grid consisting of multiple 8 pixel by 8 pixel squares, known as tiles, with the tile Pac-Man currently resides in generally being the thing used by the ghosts to determine which direction they will go after they transition to a new tile. In fact, only one of the ghosts in Pac-Man actually directly chases the titular hero, Blinky (the red ghost), while the rest have movements that don’t go directly for Pac-Man, but are influenced by Pac-Man’s current position on the screen. This was a deliberate choice Iwatani made very early on in the game’s development so that, as he said, “they weren’t all just chasing after Pac-Man in single file, which would have been tiresome and flat.”
(See: The Fascinating Origin of Pac-Man)Īccording to Iwatani, all of the ghosts in Pac-Man have their own distinct personality which influences the movements they make.
However, as it turns out, the ghost’s movements are defined by a deceptively simple set of algorithms thought up by the game’s designer, Toru Iwatani. The ghosts in Pac-Man are among some of the most enduring enemies in video game history, thanks in part to their surprisingly difficult to predict movements which make the game a constant challenge for new and seasoned players alike. asks: How do the ghosts in Pac Man move? It seems mostly random, but is it really?
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