10 Most Profitable Arcade Games That Made BILLIONS
4. Ms. Pac-Man - Bally/Midway (1982)
Revenue To Date: $2.137 billion
When video games were being developed in the late '70s and early '80s, characters were either male, or they were androgynous ships, vehicles, or the like. Pac-Man offered something few games bothered with, and that was a style of nonviolent gameplay. While Pac-Man could die, and he could eat ghosts, there really wasn't anything violent about it.
That pacifist style of gameplay appealed to girls, which led Midway to do something innovative. The company decided to change things up a bit by creating a female character, with the specific goal of attracting girls to the growing industry, and it worked.
Of course, the game appealed to everyone, and it wasn't because of the red bow atop Ms. Pac-Man's head either. The title featured four new maze designs instead of the sole maze found on its predecessor, but the real innovation came in the ghosts' movement. They were programmed to move randomly, which made gameplay incredibly difficult.
In the first Pac-Man game, the ghosts had set patterns, which could be memorized. Ms. Pac-Man wasn't as 'easy,' and that made it more entertaining. The game sold 125,000 units, which garnered around $1.2 billion by 1993. Adjusted, that amounts to $2.137 billion.