Pac-Man Fever (song)
Pac-Man Fever is a 1981 novelty song by Buckner & Garcia inspired by the arcade game Pac-Man. Released in December 1981, it climbed to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1982 and was certified Gold that same month for shipping over a million copies. By the end of 1982 it had sold about 1.2 million copies, and total sales reached around 2.5 million by 2008. VH1 later ranked it No. 98 on its list of the 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 1980s.
A follow-up, "Do the Donkey Kong," released in May 1982, just missed the charts at No. 103. The song remains a cultural touchstone and has been referenced in TV shows such as South Park (Splatty Tomato, 2017), Family Guy (The D in Apartment 23, 2017), and The Simpsons (A Tale of Two Springfields).
Musically, the sheet music shows a common-time 4/4 beat at 138 beats per minute in the key of F major.
Origin: Buckner & Garcia were recording in the Atlanta area when they saw a Pac-Man machine, played for two hours, and decided to write a song about it. After initial radio indifference, a local station, WSTR in Atlanta, started playing it, which led CBS Records to release the single.
Other releases and versions: An unplugged version was recorded in 1998 for Retro Rewind. In 1999 the duo re-recorded the album and released it independently; CBS distributed a 2002 version through K-Tel because the original master tapes were not available, so much of the sound had to be recreated. For the 2015 film Pixels, Buckner and Garcia teamed with Jace Hall to create "Pac-Man Fever Eat Em’ Up" using Garcia’s vocal.
Parody: Weird Al Yankovic also released a Pac-Man spoof, "Pac-Man," in 1981, included on Dr. Demento’s Basement Tapes No. 4 and Squeeze Box.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:46 (CET).