What fruit appears as the first bonus item in Pac-Man?

The first bonus fruit in Pac-Man is the cherry. It appears as the first item in the game’s escalating sequence of bonus symbols and awards extra points when Pac-Man collects it.

Bonus items appear below the ghost house after Pac-Man eats a specified number of dots. The cherry is worth 100 points in the original arcade game, making it the smallest-value fruit in the standard bonus sequence. Later items include the strawberry, orange, apple, melon, and galaxian flagship, with their point values increasing as the player reaches higher levels.

The fruit symbols were inspired by the visual language of slot machines, whose reels commonly use cherries and other fruit as prize symbols. They also serve as visual indicators of progress: the icons displayed beneath the maze show the types of bonus items associated with the levels the player has reached. Players sometimes remember the strawberry as the first fruit because it appears early and is more visually distinctive, but the cherry comes first in the original Pac-Man sequence.