A strange little side quest
Before the next round of Hamleys Magic Toy Factory, here is a piece of the bigger picture. Pac-Man went on sale in 1980, and its creator Toru Iwatani famously linked the character's shape to a pizza with a slice missing. That old idea kept changing rather than disappearing. Spacewar! appeared on MIT's PDP-1 in 1962 and became one of the earliest influential computer games shared among programmers. It is a good reminder that simple game mechanics can carry a surprising amount of history.
