Munchman squeezes Namco’s arcade hit Pac-Man into a glowing tabletop game – and its round, bright-yellow casing looks just like the hungry hero himself.
Tomy built it in Japan, where it was sold as Puckman, the arcade game’s original Japanese name. Grandstand brought it to Britain in 1981 under its own label. A vacuum fluorescent display lights the maze in cyan, Munchman in yellow-green and the monsters and power stars in red.
Interesting facts
One game, many names. Tomy sold the same unit as Puckman in Japan and Grandstand rebadged it as Munchman for Britain in 1981. It reached North America as the Tomytronic Pac Man in 1982 and Australia as Futuretronics’ Pac Man-1. Only the sticker and box changed.
Pac-Man fever. Pocket Pac-Men were everywhere in 1981–82: Entex’s PacMan2, Epoch’s Pak Pak Man (Grandstand’s Mini-Munchman), Gakken’s Puck Monster (sold by CGL in Europe) and Coleco’s tabletop Pac-Man. Collectors still rate this one for its striking design.
From Harrogate to the high street. Grandstand began in 1973 as a Harrogate mail-order firm and within a year was Britain’s biggest calculator supplier. By the 1980s it was importing and renaming games from Tomy, Epoch, Entex and VTech – Munchman, Astro Wars and Scramble among them.