Pac-Man mouse pads for the desk

Padrift's Pac-Man mouse pads and desk mats are our own designs inspired by the 1980 arcade classic, printed in high resolution from edge to edge on a 3 mm neoprene pad with a fabric top, a non-slip base and a stitched border that won't fray. There are eight desk sizes, from an 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) pad for the mouse alone to a 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm) mat for the whole setup; a design's product page tells you which of those it is made in. Each pad is printed for its own order rather than pulled from a shelf.

Pac-Man was designed by Toru Iwatani at Namco and reached Japanese arcades on May 22, 1980, under the name Puck Man. Midway brought it to North America that October with the name changed to Pac-Man. Iwatani wanted a game that would appeal to everyone, not only to players who liked shooting aliens, and the shape of his hero came, by his own account, from a pizza with one slice missing. Four decades later, the yellow circle is still one of the most recognized images in gaming.

Black, blue and yellow on a desk

The arcade screen has a palette that almost designs a desk by itself: a black background, maze walls in electric blue, a yellow hero, small pale dots and four ghosts in red, pink, cyan and orange. Black is the base, which means a Pac-Man mat sits naturally on a dark setup with a black keyboard and mouse, where the blue lines and yellow circle glow like the original monitor.

That palette also gets along with lighting. Blue RGB picks up the maze walls, warm yellow matches Pac-Man himself, and a keyboard that cycles through colors will hit one of the ghosts sooner or later. On a white desk the black field reads as a bold graphic block, closer to a framed poster than to a piece of gaming gear.

A tall maze on a wide mat

The original maze is taller than it is wide, because the arcade monitor was mounted upright. A desk mat is the opposite shape, wide and shallow, so a Pac-Man design has to make a choice. It can show a horizontal slice of the maze, with corridors running the full width of the mat. It can set the complete maze at one end and leave the rest of the mat black, with Pac-Man and a ghost racing toward it. Or it can repeat the corridors into a pattern that has no beginning or end.

The side tunnel helps any of those layouts. In the game, Pac-Man can leave through a gap on one side of the maze and come back through the other, and ghosts slow down inside it. On a mat, a tunnel at each short edge turns the whole desk into a loop, with the keyboard sitting over the middle corridors and the mouse hand working near the exit.

Four ghosts, four personalities

The ghosts look alike but don't think alike. Blinky, the red one, heads straight for Pac-Man. Pinky aims for the spot just ahead of him, trying to cut him off. Inky, in cyan, works out his target from both Pac-Man's position and Blinky's, which makes him the hardest to predict. Clyde, the orange one, chases until he gets close and then wanders back to his own corner. Every so often all four break off and retreat to their corners before the hunt resumes.

That gives each ghost a personality worth putting on a desk. Choose the one that matches your keycaps or your temperament: red Blinky for someone who goes straight at a problem, Clyde for someone who gets close and loses interest. On a long mat, the four lined up with their eyes all turned toward the mouse hand make a simple, funny composition.

Power pellets and blue ghosts

Each maze holds 240 small dots and four large power pellets near its corners. Eating a pellet turns the tables for a few seconds: the ghosts turn dark blue, flee and can be eaten, worth 200, 400, 800 and then 1,600 points in a row. As the effect wears off, they flash white in warning, and an eaten ghost's eyes race back to the house in the middle of the maze to regenerate.

That moment makes the strongest single image for a small pad. A power pellet and a frightened blue ghost, set toward the top of the 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) pad, read instantly and leave the lower half free for your hand. A pair of eyes hurrying home is an even quieter version, for anyone who wants the reference without the color.

A fruit for every level

Twice in each level, a bonus item appears below the ghost house: cherries first, then a strawberry, an orange, an apple, a melon, the flagship from Namco's earlier shooter Galaxian, a bell and finally a key, which repeats from then on. The values climb from 100 points for the cherries to 5,000 for the key, and the row of collected fruit sits at the bottom corner of the screen as a record of how far you've come.

That row translates directly to a long mat. Lined up along the front edge, the eight items read as a timeline, and they are small enough for the keyboard to sit above them without covering any. A single cherry pair is the simplest Pac-Man symbol there is, and it works on a desk where you'd rather nobody noticed a game at all.

Arrow keys and cornering

Pac-Man was built for a four-way arcade joystick, and on a computer it plays on the arrow keys. Good players learn a trick called cornering: pressing the new direction just before reaching a turn lets Pac-Man cut the corner and gain a little ground on the ghosts. It matters because Pac-Man loses a fraction of speed with every dot he eats, a cost the ghosts never pay.

All of that means the mouse barely moves during a game, and the mat's real work is under the keyboard. The non-slip base keeps the board in place during fast inputs, and the cushioned neoprene softens the desk under your wrists. If you play with an arcade stick on the desk, an XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm), holds the stick and a keyboard side by side and stops the stick from walking across the desk.

3,333,360 and the perfect game

A perfect game of Pac-Man scores 3,333,360 points. To get it, a player has to clear every dot, eat all four ghosts after every power pellet and collect every bonus item on every level, without losing a life, until the game breaks at level 256, where a bug scrambles the right half of the screen. It takes hours of flawless play and has been done only a handful of times.

For a competitive player, the score line itself makes a design: the arcade's blocky digits along the top of a long mat, a high score at the end of it and the maze below. It suits a desk where someone practices patterns, the memorized routes that keep the ghosts from cornering you, and it's a gentle challenge to anyone who sits down at it.

Ms. Pac-Man and her bow

Ms. Pac-Man arrived in arcades in 1982, with a red bow, a beauty mark and four new mazes in different colors, plus smarter ghosts and fruit that bounced around the maze instead of sitting still. Her mazes come in pinks, oranges and blues instead of the original's single blue, which gives the series a warmer, brighter palette.

A Ms. Pac-Man design suits a desk with pink peripherals or a pastel keyboard, and her red bow is a neat small symbol on its own. On a shared desk, a pair of designs, Pac-Man for one player and Ms. Pac-Man for the other, settles the question of whose mat is whose.

Championship Edition in neon

Pac-Man Championship Edition, released in 2007, rebuilt the game for a new generation with glowing neon mazes, faster play and a timer that kept the pressure on. Its sequel, Championship Edition DX, followed in 2010 with long trains of sleeping ghosts that wake as you pass. Both swapped the flat arcade palette for light trails, lens glow and color shifting with every level.

That look is made for an RGB desk. A neon maze in magenta, cyan and lime pairs with a keyboard that cycles through colors, and the glowing lines stay visible even when a hand covers part of the mat. It is the Pac-Man choice for someone whose setup is built around lighting rather than nostalgia.

The Doodle that took over an office

On May 21, 2010, Google celebrated the game's 30th anniversary by turning the logo on its homepage into a playable Pac-Man maze, with the letters of Google built into the walls. For a day or so, anyone who opened the search page at work found a game waiting for them, and plenty of people lost a lunch break to it.

That gives Pac-Man a certain charm on an office desk. A mat with a maze, a cherry pair or four small ghosts is a light joke about the game that once sneaked onto every work computer, and its black-and-blue look still passes as a graphic pattern in a meeting.

Sprite or cartoon

There are really two Pac-Mans. One is the arcade sprite, a yellow circle with a wedge for a mouth and nothing else. The other is the cartoon character with eyes, arms and legs who starred in a Hanna-Barbera series in 1982 and later in 3D games such as Pac-Man World, released for the original PlayStation in 1999, where he ran and jumped in red shoes.

The sprite suits a minimal desk, where a single circle and wedge on black reads as design first. The cartoon version suits a younger player, who will find a running, waving Pac-Man more fun than an abstract shape, and it brings a little more color to a child's desk.

A game for every age at the same desk

Pac-Man takes seconds to learn: eat the dots, avoid the ghosts, eat a pellet and turn the chase around. That makes it one of the few games a five-year-old, a parent and a grandparent can all play and talk about. A Pac-Man pad on a child's desk often comes with that story attached, the game an adult played in an arcade passed on to the next generation.

For a child's desk, a bright design with the ghosts and fruit at the edges and a calm black center works well, leaving a quiet surface for drawing or homework. The non-slip base keeps the mat from sliding when small elbows lean on it, and the dark background is forgiving of small marks.

Sizes for a Pac-Man desk

The product page for each design lists the sizes on offer. These are the ones that suit Pac-Man art.

Setup	Size	Good for
Mouse only	S, 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm)	A power pellet and a blue ghost
Laptop or arcade stick	TCG Mat, 14″ × 24″ (35.5 × 61 cm)	The full maze, upright as on the cabinet
Compact keyboard	M, 11.8″ × 27.6″ (30 × 70 cm)	A row of bonus fruit along the front
Keyboard and mouse	XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm)	A wide slice of maze with a tunnel at each end
Deep desk	XXL, 23.6″ × 35.4″ (60 × 90 cm)	A neon Championship Edition maze
The whole desk	4XL, 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm)	The four ghosts chasing across the entire desk

For a desk that is long but shallow, L, 11.8″ × 31.5″ (30 × 80 cm), lets a fruit row or a ghost chase stretch past M, and 3XL, 19.7″ × 39.4″ (50 × 100 cm), shows more of the maze than XL without the full depth of XXL.

Gifts for an arcade player

A Pac-Man mouse pad suits someone who played in an arcade in the early 1980s, a collector of retro games, a child who just discovered the ghosts or a coworker with a black-and-blue desk. May 22, the day the game reached Japanese arcades in 1980, makes a good date to aim for. If you can't see the desk first, the XL is a safe choice, with room for a keyboard and a mouse, and the classic maze suits nearly any setup.

Making the pad takes 1–3 business days. It is then shipped from Turkey and normally reaches a US address 2–5 business days after it leaves.

Keeping a black mat clean

A black field hides oil and small stains but shows dust and pet hair. Once a week, go over the maze with a lint roller or a damp cloth so the blue lines stay crisp. For a deeper clean, wash it by hand in a sink of lukewarm water with mild soap, rinse until no suds remain, press it between towels and leave it flat to dry. Don't machine wash it, don't tumble dry it and don't iron it; the fade-resistant print keeps the yellow and blue bright for years when it's cared for this way.

A note on names

Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, Clyde and the other names mentioned here are used only to describe what our designs are inspired by. Padrift is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by Bandai Namco Entertainment.