# Are all four ghosts in Pac-Man chasing you? Only one always aims at you.

- Series: [How It Spawns](https://miu.fm/howitspawns.md)
- Published: 2026-10-14
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitspawns/are-all-four-ghosts-in-pac-man-chasing-you-only-one-always

## Story

Are all four ghosts in Pac-Man chasing you? Only one always aims at you.

In 1980, Pac-Man's designer at Namco, Toru Iwatani, didn't want the ghosts "all just chasing after Pac Man in single file, which would have been tiresome and flat" (1985, through an interpreter). In 2020 he put it this way: if all four always chased Pac-Man's position, "they would have formed a conga line." He credits programmer Shigeo Funaki with "the exquisite ghost algorithm."

As Jamey Pittman's Pac-Man Dossier documents from the arcade code, every ghost has a target square. At each crossing it looks one square down every open way except back, measures the straight line from there to its target, and takes the shortest (ties go up, left, down, right). All four share that rule; only the targets differ. One aims at Pac-Man's square. One aims four squares ahead of Pac-Man (facing up, four up and four left: a small arithmetic bug, as Don Hodges found in the code). One takes the line from the first ghost to the square two ahead of Pac-Man and doubles it. One aims at Pac-Man only from eight or more squares away and otherwise heads for its corner. In the arcade game they are Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde (Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke and Guzuta in Japan). Every so often all four scatter to their corners on a timer, and when frightened they turn by a pseudo-random generator that restarts the same way every level, so even that repeats.

The maze, the hunters and the run in this film are our own simplified version, built in code: our own maze, a fixed loop for the player, chase mode only, slowed down. The line of four all aiming at you is our own demonstration of Iwatani's worry.

Which game's hidden rules should we cut open next?

Sources: Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work (1986), interview with Toru Iwatani. Toru Iwatani, OPENERS interview (2020). Jamey Pittman, The Pac-Man Dossier. Don Hodges, on the up-direction bug (2008).
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Bandai Namco.

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