Ghost monsters

 

The ghosts in Pac-Man aren't actually ghosts, they're just hiding under sheets. I've always called them ghosts, though, and don't intend to stop now. Anyway, more interesting than what they're called as a group, is what their individual names are...

The original Japanese version of the game gives them each a "character" and "nickname" (although Japanese, the game is all written in Roman alphabet, and all in English except these names), which seems to have caused a bit of confusion in the early years of Pac-Man - "character" is meant to mean a description of the ghost's personality or behaviour, not 'this is the name of the character'. They describe how the red one chases you, the pink one ambushes, the blue one is unpredictable, the orange one is... 'feigning ignorance' seems to be the agreed translation on the internet, I don't know. The "nicknames" are just based on the colours red, pink and blue, and the fourth is the slow one.

If you connect two points on the game's circuit board together, you can change the names to "English" ones, and you can just about see what they were going for - "urchin" in the sense of sticking to you, and so on.

But when the game came to America, they either didn't know about the "English" names or thought they were stupid, so they went in and changed them into all-new character/nickname combinations. Except Pinky.

And the person who had to go in and do the reprogramming at least noticed the alternate names, replacing them with placeholders presumably in case anyone wanted to come up with some alternatives. So, undocumented in the instructions, arcade owners outside Japan could still connect those two bits of the circuit board and show these names instead, if they really wanted to.

But the early guidebooks that soon flooded the market unanimously referred to the 'character' as the name of the ghost, as well as claiming that Pinky is the fastest (he actually isn't) and Clyde the slowest (again, not) and that Inky will run away from you (only sometimes). This one is particularly good, since it calls them Monsters, but gives alternatives of Ghosts, Zombies or Screw-Eyes. Never mind what I said at the start, I'm calling them Screw-Eyes from now on.