His company was growing but it wouldn't hit its stride till the 1970s. With the rise of video games, Nakamura saw a need in the market that he could fill. He believed in the video game industry and hired software engineers to develop titles for the arcade. The result of his ambitious gamble came in 1980. An employee of his company, Toru Iwatani, created Pac-Man. Iwatani would later reveal that Pac-Man's design was inspired by a pizza missing a slice and the "Pac" in Pac-Man came from the Japanese onomatopoeic word "pakku", which loosely translates to "gobble" or "munch".

Its legacy in gaming can still be felt today and it's often referenced in pop-culture. Most recently, the yellow sprite appeared in Wreck-It Ralph, gobbling up shrimp cocktails and in Pixels, as the secondary antagonist to Adam Sandler's unstoppable band of juvenile grown ups.

Pac-Man also appears in an animated TV-series in the 80's, a CG animated series titled Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures in 2013, as a playable character in the video game Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, and he even has a song out called "Pac-Man Fever".