I thought this was an interesting tidbit about one of gaming's more well known series.
Source: http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160102/p2a/00m/0na/003000cMainichi said:Pac-Man was released in 1980 by video game developer Namco (present-day Bandai Namco Entertainment) and took arcades around the world by storm. Iwatani, who was an employee at Namco at the time, later became a professor at Tokyo Polytechnic University Faculty of Arts' video game development department in 2007, where he now teaches game planning and programming.
"The development of Pac-Man started as a way to attract women to arcades, which were generally a men's playground. We thought that women liked to eat, so we came up with the idea of making a video game where a cute character eats little monsters rather than a savage video game where you kill your enemies," Iwatani recalls. He says the shape of Pac-Man was inspired by a pizza with one slice missing.