tadashi yamashita

happened to be watching the C102 niconama at the right time and got to see them stumble their way to the table where zekuu was selling a new reference book about tadashi yamashita. that’s the guy that designed the pac-man with eyes that actually were shaped to look like his body. more in my specific lane of interest, he also drafted the logotypes, key art, and cabinet wraps for a ton of early namco classics like xevious, galaga, cutie Q, and pole position, where he borrowed elements of 70s americana for their type and design treatments. hearing that inspiration disclosed explicitly makes it funny to think that the pac-man cab that was tucked into the corner of my local long-gone pizza joint has as much to do with my own image of americana as unlimited salad bars and red plastic cups.

yamashita doesn’t seem to turn up much coverage at all, even in japanese, and it’s only recently that he’s started to show up for interviews surrounding the pac-man 40th anniversary and hamster’s arcade archives, so it’s doubly impressive to me that this book seems to have meticulously captured his work both before and after his time at namco. from those interviews, he definitely seems humble and happy enough to let people like iwatani and dotman be the public faces of retro namco, despite having an equally visible impact on the identity of those games. until now I had really only seen him explored in any depth by the namco museum of art upload a few months back, which they’ve inexplicably wiped and are still well behind on reuploading, so I recommend checking it out early on the internet archive if you enjoy seeing games get the high art treatment with a mellow narrator and harpischord.