Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia were a songwriting team from Akron, Ohio who recorded jingles and commercials in the Atlanta area when they got hooked on Pac-Man. Their first encounter with the game was at a restaurant in Marietta, Georgia. In our interview with Buckner, he told the story: "Everybody was playing it so we started playing it too. Well, we got hooked and we ended up sitting in there for two hours instead of going back and working. We did this for a while and I said, 'Hey, let's do a song about this,' and Gary said, 'Yeah, okay, it seems like it's something fun.' Because we were doing a lot of jingles and making pretty good money, we thought we could get play here in Atlanta and get our names out there. We'd put our names on the song and get some local play and that would help us get some commercials. That was the original intention. We never dreamed that this thing could be a national hit like it was."
The song describes a guy who heads to the arcade with a pocketful of quarters. He plays so much Pac-Man, his shoulder hurts from so much time on the joystick. The game isn't very complicated, so just about every aspect of play gets a mention in the lyric: avoiding ghosts, getting the fruit, heading out the back door, etc. Once his quarters are gone, he heads home and plans to do it again the next night.
Buckner & Garcia were slightly ahead of the Pac-Man trend. By the time the game became a phenomenon, they had already released the song on a small label and were in a position to capitalize on the Pac-Man craze. One of their friends who was a morning disc jockey on the Atlanta radio station 94Q played it a few times on his show, and the single started selling. This got the attention of CBS Records, who signed them to a deal and issued it as a single in wide release.
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