achieved a level of success and cultural recognition
worthy of the original.
In addition to board, card, and video games, li-
censedPac-Man products included toys, clothes,
chalkboards, pillows, erasers, bubble pipes, costumes,
shower curtains, pens, jewelry, lunchboxes, bumper
stickers, and books. The game also inspired a 1982 hit
single (Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fe-
ver”) and a Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, starring
Marty Ingels as Pac-Man, which ran on the American
Broadcasting Company (ABC) from 1982 to 1984. A
motion picture was planned but never filmed.
Impact Selling hundreds of thousands of units,
Pac-Maninjected humor and minimized the vio-
lence common to many video games of the 1980’s.
The popularity of the Pac-Man character also proved
decisive to the history of video games. In later years,
companies would discover that iconic franchise
characters—such as Pac-Man, Mario, or Sonic the
Hedgehog—were essential, not only for merchan-
dising but also to drive sales of new games and new
consoles.
Further Reading
DeMaria, Rusel, and Wilson, Johnny L.High Score!
The Illustrated Histor y of Electronic Games. San Fran-
cisco: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2003.
Johnson, Rick. “What’s Round and Yellow and
Laughs All the Way to the Bank?”VIDIOT(Febru-
ary/March, 1983).
Kohler, Chris.Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games
Gave the World an Extra Life.Indianapolis: Brady-
Games/Penguin Group, 2004.
Bill Knight
See also Fads; Japan and North America; Toys and
games; Video games and arcades.
Pan Am Flight 103 bombing
The Event Terrorist attack on a civilian airliner
Date December 21, 1988
Place Lockerbie, Scotland
Following a terrorist attack on a civilian jet that killed 259
passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground, airline
safety had to be tightened considerably, and a long investi-
gation and legal process ensued.
At 6:25p.m.,Pan Am Flight 103 departed London
Heathrow Airport bound for New York. It had on
board 244 passengers, 47 of whom had transferred
from a feeder flight from Frankfurt, Germany, as
well as 15 crew members. It crossed the England-
Scotland border at 7:00p.m.At 7:02p.m., Scottish Air
Traffic Control at Prestwick lost the plane on the ra-
dar. The airliner had exploded over the small town
of Lockerbie in southern Scotland. The explosion
was so massive and so sudden that the plane broke
apart in thousands of fragments, scattering over a
hundred square miles. The wings fell on a small row
of houses, demolishing them and killing eleven peo-
ple as the aviation fuel went up in a huge fireball.
The Investigation Soldiers were deployed to locate
the plane’s fragments and search for bodies. After
forensic testing at the scene, the bodies were taken
to a makeshift mortuary at the town hall, before be-
ing released to relatives. The pieces of the plane
were taken to nearby Longtown, where they were
reassembled to reveal a large hole in the forward
baggage hold under the cockpit. Forensic tests un-
dertaken at the Royal Armaments Research Estab-
lishment at Kew found traces of Semtex, a plastic ex-
plosive, and a timer packed in a radio, in a suitcase.
Thus, within a few days, terrorism was seen as the
likely cause. The local Scottish police force was given
charge of the investigation, with help from the U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other
agencies as needed.
The Suspects Middle Eastern groups were imme-
diately suspected, especially a faction of the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Ahmed
Jabril, based in Damascus, Syria. Another suspect
was the Abu Nidal Organization, based in Libya. A
number of revenge motives were proposed, includ-
ing a recent bombing raid on Libya in 1986 by the
U.S. military—which had killed an adopted daugh-
ter of the Libyan president, Colonel Muammar al-
Qaddafi—and the accidental downing of an Iranian
passenger jet by the USSVincennesin the Persian
Gulf in July, 1988.
Frankfurt was where one such terrorist group
had a cell that had been responsible for the 1986
bombing of a West Berlin nightclub that killed two
Americans. West German police had soon discov-
ered bomb-making equipment and had arrested a
number of suspects. It was thought that a member of
one of the suspected terrorist groups could have744 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing The Eighties in America