Is That A Fact?!

Aubrey Beardsley’s “On This Day” fun facts and trivia

On this day, in 1980, Pac-Man, the most important video game of all time, was launched by Namco, Japan.

Pac-Man has gone on to become one of the highest-grossing video games ever, as well as one of the most significant and persistent social phenomena of the 1980s.

Pac-Man was originally called Puck Man, but when the game went to the US, the potential for inappropriate re-imaginings of the name motivated the name change to Pac-Man.

Apparently, the breakthrough moment came when the game designer, Toru Iwatani, was eating a pizza. He looked at the missing slice, saw the pizza face, and Pac-Man was born!

Pizza has a very ancient history, right back to the Stone Age when they didn’t even have scooters to make the pizza deliveries. But the first reference to the word “pizza” was in the 1st century in Italy. It was in an instruction to tenants to give the bishop of Gaeta twelve pizzas for Christmas and twelve pizzas on Easter Sunday. Turkeys everywhere wish they lived in Gaeta.

And while Marie Antoinette might have advised everyone to eat cake, her sister, Marie Carolina, preferred pizza. She even had ovens built in the cookouts when they would all barbecue after hunting. Instead of eating the poor ducklings and pigs, she preferred a nice slice of Margherita pizza!

And that’s a fact!

The most important ingredient for pizza is cheese