Pac-Man at 40: How the little yellow fellow inspired one of the greatest novelty songs of all time

Lyndsey Parker
·Editor in Chief, Yahoo Music
Updated ·11 min read

Pac-Man turns 40 years old this month, and it's safe to say he's still got it. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, he's the still best-known video game character in the world (recognized by 94 percent of consumers), and he has spawned a cottage industry that’s included a Saturday morning cartoon show, a kiddie breakfast cereal, and a whole bunch of weird yellow stuff.

But most importantly, the little yellow fellow inspired one of the most successful songs of all time, Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever." The boogie-rockin’ tune went to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold a whopping 1.2 million copies; People magazine called it one of the top pop-cultural events of all time; it made VH1’s list of “100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the ‘80s”; and it has since been spoofed or references on Family Guy, The Simpsons, and South Park.

Now one-half of Bucker & Garcia, Jerry Buckner, and another one of his longtime musical collaborators, Mike Stewart, are celebrating Pac-Man’s big 4-0 with Pac-Man Fever: The Story Behind the Unlikely ’80’s Hit That Defined a Worldwide Craze, the first-ever Kindle E-book to contain music. (It comes with a secret link to the “Pac-Man Fever Vault,” a virtual treasure trove of audio artifacts for Pac fanatics to gobble up like power pellets.)

Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume, Buckner seems aware and perfectly at peace with the fact that his main musical legacy will always be tied to “Pac-Man Fever,” even though he had a successful career before and after that leftfield hit. (He’s never been one to disavow his video-game ties, even performing the title song for the Disney movie Wreck-It Ralph in 2012.) He and Gary Garcia, who died in 2011, started playing together in high school and in the ‘70s launched a “pretty good little business” writing ad jingles. The irony is not lost on him that eventually he and Garcia broke through with what was basically a “three-minute, 49-second commercial for Pac-Man for 40 years.”

Bucker and Garcia met their destiny when they took a break from the studio during a jingle session to eat dinner at a nearby restaurant in Marietta, Ga., called Shillings. That’s when the magical yellow glow of a tabletop game machine caught their attention. “We could see it,” Buckner recalls of the early mania he witnessed at Shillings.

Buckner & Garcia in 1981. (Photo: Columbia/CBS Records)
Buckner & Garcia in 1981. (Photo: Columbia/CBS Records)

“People would stand in line, they'd put quarters on the machines, standing in line to play and arguing over [whose turn it was]. It was craziness. We had no idea what this thing was, but we sat down and played it — and, well, we got hooked, just like everybody else that played it,” laughs Buckner, who admits he’s still not very good at the game and refuses to divulge his high score.

Pretty soon, Buckner and Garcia were at Shillings every night “instead of working. The studio was calling and saying, ‘Hey, you guys coming in?’ And we were playing the game all the time. So, it was decided at some point that maybe we could come up with some kind of little song and get a little bit of local exposure, maybe a little story to help our jingle business. That was the idea.”

Stewart recalls realizing that “Pac-Man Fever” was something special early on. “Gary was a great lyricist. He came up with ‘I got a pocket full of quarters and I’m headed to the arcade,’ which is a catchphrase for the pretty much for the whole generation,” he chuckles.

“We didn't really know what we had until we finished with the record,” says Buckner. “Then we said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This is better than just some local thing.’ But I never dreamed it would be a worldwide hit like it was.”

Unlike the Pac-Man arcade game, however, “Pac-Man Fever” wasn’t an overnight hit: Buckner & Garcia’s production company shopped the song and was “turned down by every record label in the world.” No one was biting, so to speak. So the duo decided to release it themselves in fall 1981 on their own imprint, BGO Records. That’s when a local Atlanta DJ named Jim Morrison started spinning it on his morning show, and soon after, major labels started paying attention.

“[Morrison] said it reminded him… well, he wasn't comparing us to the Beatles, but he said it reminded him of that, of that kind of energy and excitement at the time. The phones were like lit up like Christmas trees asking to hear the song,” says Buckner. “The first time it was ever played, they got so many calls that he had to play it again the same hour, which radio never does. … So they knew something special was going on with it.”

Eventually Buckner & Garcia signed to CBS/Columbia, and they were thrilled when their new label’s vice-president, Mickey Eichner, commissioned an entire album. They were less thrilled when they found out exactly what sort of album CBS had in mind.

“We were pop songwriters, so we had written a couple of songs and had them done. So the one of the vice-presidents from CBS flew to Atlanta to see what's going on and check up on us. We took him in to play the songs and he goes, ‘No, no, no, no, no. We've got to have all game songs!’ And you can't tell CBS what to do.” Bucker & Garcia reluctantly retooled those two existing tracks, “Girl Like You” and “Pretty Thing” (the original versions of which can be accessed via the Pac-Man Fever Vault), into “Goin’ Berzerk” and “Mousetrap.” And then it was time to grab a pocketful of quarters and head back to the arcade, to do some market research, and figure out what to write about for the album’s five other cuts.

“The process was we would go in a club or an arcade, find a game, and find somebody who knew how to play it, and then we'd watch them play and ask questions. Then we'd go home at 2 in the morning and start writing, get a couple hours sleep, and start on that song the next day. We had to do that album in about two and a half weeks,” says Buckner. Other games that got the Buckner & Garcia treatment were Frogger (“Froggy’s Lament”), Hyperspace, and Defender, but Buckner confesses with a laugh that he wishes they’d penned tunes about Space Invaders and Paperboy.

Bucker says CBS “turned them loose” in the studio during the whirlwind process, and recalls an amusing story when they got in a feud with Southern rockers .38 Special, with whom they were sharing recording space. “[Our engineer] always wanted to talk about .38 Special this and.38 Special that, and it really irritated Gary. This went on for a few days and finally we got just tired of hearing about it, so I said, ‘Come on, it's just a bunch of guitars and s***!’” Word got back to .38 Special’s Jeff Carlisi, who mistakenly attributed the insult to Garcia and retaliated by drawing an unflattering caricature of Garcia and leaving it in the studio for the duo to find. “It was just an awful picture. I mean, it looked like a Neanderthal man with a belt on with little Pac-Men on it,” says Buckner.

Garcia then took things to the next level by commissioning an artist to mock up a cover for a fake .38 Special album called Guitars and S*** — which, true to Garcia’s above-mentioned way with words, had song titles like “Guitars and S***,” “S*** and Guitars,” and “Two Guitars and a Pile of S***.” Carlisi was furious and threatened to “kick Gary’s ass,” but eventually the feud subsided — and then that.38 Special-worshipping engineer grabbed the Guitars and S*** album for himself. “I've called him and said I want it back,” says Buckner. “I'm very upset about that, because I want the Guitars and S*** album back!”

When Pac-Man Fever eventually came out, its second single "Do the Donkey Kong" unfortunately stalled on the pop charts at No. 103, but Buckner’s favorite track on the album, the Christopher Cross-esque power ballad "Ode to a Centipede," should've been a hit. However, the album did actually sell an incredible 2.5 million copies worldwide (just imagine how many quarters that equals!), and Buckner & Garcia rode the wave as long as they could.

The duo even got to lip-sync their hit on TV a couple times for a national audience of arcade addicts, although Buckner says he embarrassed himself both times — first on American Bandstand, when he was rendered star-struck by his childhood idol Dick Clark and could barely speak during their interview, and then on Solid Gold, when he showed up in a Groucho Marx mustache and lab coat, mistakenly thinking that Garcia would be in a crazy costume too. (“[Host] Marilyn McCoo was looked at me and she said, ‘Who are you supposed to be?’ I said, ‘I'm supposed to be an idiot. Thank you.’”) They never toured because Garcia wasn’t interested, and only played “Pac-Man Fever” live twice. Thankfully, one of those performances, at their guitarist Chris Bowman’s wedding, was captured on camera, and in a recent Zoom reunion jam with the original “Pac-Man Fever” musicians to celebrate Pac-Man’s anniversary, Buckner and Stewart synched that video of the late Garcia’s performance to their live playing.

After “Pac-Man Fever” fever died down, Bucker & Garcia attempted to capitalize on another ‘80s phenomenon, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with what was supposed to be their next big hit, “E.T. I Love You.” Buckner had originally written the ballad as an ode to his recently deceased dog, but was so emotionally moved after seeing Steven Spielberg’s alien fantasy film that he retooled the tune, and he had a premonition that it could be even more successful than “Pac-Man Fever.” He actually recalls Garcia, after laying down the “E.T. I Love You” vocals in the studio, saying, “I just sang a swimming pool!” — meaning he was already imagining the royalties the song would generate.

“We took it over to our management people. They listened to it and everybody went crazy. They loved the record. Arnie [Geller], our manager, got on a plane that day, flew to Columbia Records. He called me and said, ‘I'm playing the song for the Mickey Eichner, and some of the girls that are working here, they're crying. It touched them so much,’” says Buckner. “So CBS goes, ‘Whoa, this is hot. This is big.’ So then Arnie flew out to California to meet with Steven Spielberg to get his permission. I remember he called back and said to us, ‘Listen, I sat in Spielberg's office waiting to see him, but he's in there playing the record up to 10, playing it over and over and over and over again.’” Geller even claimed that Spielberg had said, “I wish this song had been in the movie,” which had Geller rather naively thinking that E.T. was going to be recalled so that the song could be added.

It wasn’t meant to be. Instead, CBS/Columbia promoted another unofficial E.T. anthem that came out around the same time, “Heartlight,” by a much bigger artist on the label’s roster, Neil Diamond. Buckner says this was “heartbreaking” at the time, but Stewart says, “In light of the reaction to the Pac-Man Fever E-book, you can believe that there’s going to be an E.T. I Love You Kindle book. So, we're announcing it here. We're thinking about it. It doesn't exist yet, except in the minds of Jerry and Gary.”

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The above interview is taken from a portion of Jerry Buckner and Mike Stewart’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Full audio of this conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app.