Professor Pac-Man
1983 video game
Professor Pac-Man is a quiz arcade video game that was produced by Bally Midway and released in August 1983. It is the seventh title in the Pac-Man series of games. It is also the last of only seven games from Bally Midway Manufacturing to run on their Midway Astrocade hardware. Only 400 cabinets were made; many of these were returned to the manufacturer and converted to Pac-Land cabinets.
Description
Designed to capitalize on the perceived quiz game niche, Professor Pac-Man presented simple visual puzzles, and required the players (or "pupils", as they are called by the game) to solve each within a short time limit. Despite the game's usage of Namco's popular Pac-Man character, Professor Pac-Man did not fare very well in the arcades, due to its slow pace and its abandonment of the famous maze-based gameplay that made the previous titles so popular.
Gameplay
The game is for one player or two (in a two-player game, the player who is the first to answer a question correctly receives its points) and consists of answering multiple-choice questions before the time runs out. The timer is the original Pac-Man, eating a row of pellets. The more pellets left when the players answer correctly, the higher the scores awarded. As the questions progress, Pac-Man eats the pellets more quickly.
The public source identifies “Professor Pac-Man” as 1983 video game. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Professor, Pac-Man and video.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3284699. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Professor Pac-Man” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.