PacmanCostume

I made an awesome Pac-man costume! I've seen some pictures of Pac-man costumes on the net, but I wasn't able to find any that are as cool as mine (although it's possible they did exist back in the 1980's). If anyone has any pictures of pac-man costumes posted on the net then let me know and I'll link to them.

Here's what it looked like after I finished the frame. You know, it's surprisingly difficult to get a circle to be perfectly round. I attached a string to the center and went around the edge and taped the circular tubing to the rest of the frame at just the right points.



Now I have hung it up and put some fabric on it.



It turns out that the fabric was too easy to see through, even when I put 2 layers on, so I added some black latex here. (The latex has a white fuzzy side for some reason, so I put that side out.)



You never think about these things until you actually try to build something like this, but a costume this big doesn't just float around on you. You have to attach yourself to it in some way. I've used two belts. One goes around my waist and attaches to the 4 corners on the bottom. The other belt goes around my chest and attaches to the upper back part of the costume (to balance it).



I won the group costume contest at work! The top of the ghost costume looks a bit lopsided, but it's really an optical illusion that results from the placement of the eyes and the angle we're looking at the costume. The top is a tiny bit lopsided, but not nearly as much as it looks like in that picture. The fabric hanging down near my legs is the result of me accidentally tearing the stitching when I stepped too widely.




I received two emails from someone named daqmustang. They kindly included pictures of a pacman and ghost costume that someone else had made. I have no idea about when these costumes where made or where or who made them. But, the pictures are very cool, so I'm displaying them here.




I found the following image of another Pac-Man costume in google images. But, this tiny image is all there was. The link to it was broken.


If anyone else has pictures of classic video game related costumes then feel free to email them to me!

Update 2008-10-27

As is usual at this time of year, I have been getting plenty of requests for more information about how to build the Pac-Man costume. It's great to hear from all of you! This year I actually started building another Pac-Man costume for someone else and after sketching out the design I realized that with my ability to create my own arbitrarily curved pvc pipes I have the ability to do a new type of design.

Keep in mind that the numbers in the bottom right are a bit mixed up. The A, B, C, E numbers apply to the lengths of the parts in the right diagram. There is no D in the right diagram. That applies only to the left diagram (I left it in when copying numbers over). The lengths for the parts on the left aren't labelled because I did the calculations and wrote down the results on another paper.

The diagram on the left has an inner box with a curved outside which is similar to the design I used in my original Pac-Man costume. However, after building that I found that the curved outer pipes actually are strong enough to support the costume by itself, so I just dropped the interior. The result is a much simpler design.

For all of you out there who lack a tube bender, something similar to the design on the left is what you want to go with except that you don't need the tubes labelled "C".