Hello there! Today I want to elaborate on a thesis I have been working on for quite a while, and it is the one in the title of this post: Pac-Man is a horror game. At first glance, this may look a bit silly (and it definitely is) and also like an early April Fool's joke, but please, indulge me for a few paragraphs.
Let's start on the most shallow level of this little journey, what the player actually sees when playing the game. Your character, Pac-Man, is being chased by four ghosts. Already, in the aesthetics, we can notice an intentional horror theming by using the ghosts as enemies, and sure, you can explain this away as just the developers wanting something fun that grabs your attention in the arcades in 1980. You would, of course, be most likely correct in your assertion, especially since stories in games back then were limited to a few lines of text on the screen before inserting coins, or one paragraph in the manual for the home release of the game, but this little argument was just me getting you in the right headspace for the next ones.
On a deeper level, the gameplay structure is very similar to modern horror games in which you are pursued by a virtually invincible foe, just like in games like Amnesia, Outlast and Alien: Isolation, and also stuff like pursuers in the modern Resident Evil games, like the Baker family, Mr. X, Lady Dimitrescu or Nemesis. To put it bluntly, you are chased through labyrinthine environments by persistent foes in those games, trying to avoid their grasp, and in Pac-Man, we can see that exact idea with the 4 ghosts, Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde, seeing you are stuck in a literal maze and all 4 of them having different routines to try an box you in while you must think on your feet and avoid their traps. To go into more detail about your pursuers, in the original game Blinky straight up chases Pac-Man, Inky will try and get to the pellet in front of himn him while also trying to maintain a specific distance from Blinky, Pinky tries to get 2 pellets in front of the player's current direction to cut him off, and Clyde is chasing him until he gets within 8 pellets's worth of distance, then he diverts towards the lower left corner of the maze. So, to summarize this point, Pac-Man fits the criterion of the chase gameplay of horror games.
Now, I can argue that Pac-Man is not just a horror game, but a survival-horror game. Stay with me, we are going deeper into the weeds with this one. A survival-horror game is, as the name implies, a subset of the horror genre that adds resource management as another concern. To further illustrate what this sub-genre is about, I will bring up Resident Evil against, since it is considered the progenitor. The game has you managing multiple resources (healing items, ammo for different guns, and ink ribbons for creating saves), while also having you decide if you should kill the enemies or try to avoid them to conserve healing items or ammo, respectively.
In Pac-Man's case, I could be cheap and argue the lives system constitutes a resource, since you have to start over if you lose all of them, but that wouldn't be as fun a point to argue, even though it would be valid. I will, instead, latch onto the power pellets in the game. Let's think for a second about their role in all this: when Pac-Man eats one, the ghosts stop chasing him and actually start running away, the reason being that now he can eat them (which is quite horrific in itself, but irrelevant to the point). So, the player has a limited resource, the power pellets (4 of them to be precise), that provide a brief moment in which the player is relatively safe and can fight back against the pursuers. The cherry on top of this is that the existence of this power-up also introduces the decision-making of survival-horror. You have to decide when to eat a power pellet to maximize its effectiveness, and you also have to decide if you want to eat ghosts or not, because if you eat one, it will respawn quite quickly and start chasing you again, and if you don't, the timer for your power will expire anyway, so your resistance only slows down their pursuit (just like the pursuers in Resident Evil, I keep circling back to this game).
In the end, I hope this little exercise in trying to analyze Pac-Man as a horror game was as interesting to you as it was to me, and that, although a little zany, it still is relatively sound.
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