Pac-Man overtook Atari’s Asteroids as the best-selling arcade game in the United States.
Asteroids, released by Atari in 1979, was a major arcade success and became Atari’s best-selling coin-operated game. Its vector graphics, rotating spacecraft, and physics-based movement made it one of the defining games of the late 1970s. Pac-Man surpassed it during the arcade boom that followed Pac-Man’s North American release.
Namco released the original Pac-Man in Japan in 1980, while Midway distributed it in North America. Its maze-chase design was easy to understand, but its pursuing ghosts, scoring system, recognizable character, and short repeatable rounds attracted a remarkably broad audience.
The comparison is about arcade performance in the United States, not worldwide sales of every Pac-Man product. Space Invaders was also enormously influential, and Galaxian and Defender were important arcade hits, but the commonly cited record states that Pac-Man overtook Asteroids as the country’s best-selling arcade game.