In Namco’s 1980 arcade game Pac-Man, the first bonus item is a cherry.
The cherry appears beneath the maze after Pac-Man eats 70 dots, making it the game’s first fruit bonus. Eating it awards 100 points, giving players a brief opportunity to increase their score beyond the points earned from dots and ghosts.
Pac-Man’s bonus items then become progressively more valuable, including strawberries, oranges, apples, melons, Galaxian flagships, bells, and keys. The item sequence is one reason the game rewards memorizing patterns and planning routes rather than simply reacting to the ghosts.
A common mix-up is confusing Pac-Man’s cherry with Ms. Pac-Man’s first bonus fruit. Ms. Pac-Man begins with a cherry too, but her bonus-item behavior and maze layouts differ from those in the original Pac-Man. The cherry is also separate from the power pellet, which changes the ghosts’ behavior but is not a fruit.