Pro tip: Why some things are worth 7650 points in Pac-Man games

Will — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:15:23 +0000

While playing through Pac-Mania, I noticed that the point values while eating the ghosts seemed to take a fairly normal progression: 200, 400, 800, 1600, etc. Getting a little further, though, and they took a strange turn

They started to be worth 7650 points. Which was odd, I thought. This score popped up in a couple of other Pac-Man games, too, and it made me think that there had to be something to it.

And I was right.

I was able to determine that this is a form of Japanese wordplay called 'Goroawase' in which you use the phonetic pronunciations of a string of numbers (which can apparently have multiple pronunciations in Japanese) to make them sound kind of like other words. So breaking down our 7650 could yield:

7 = NA
6 = MU
5 = KO
0 = O

Or "NA-MU-KO-O", which sounds a whole lot like the company that put out the game: Namco.

And it's totally lost on 99.9% of the non-Japanese video game world... until now.

You can learn more about Goroawase here.

Pro Tip of the Day - inside jokes

Pro tip: Why some things are worth 7650 points in Pac-Man games