Back in 1980, the arcade videogame phenomenon was just beginning to snowball. Space Invaders had wowed us, Defender frustrated us and then along came Namco's Pac Man to addict us.

These were the days when there were approximately three genres of game, and Pac Man created the fourth. Gobble little yellow pills and fruit bonuses while avoiding the clutches of four ghosts (Pinky, er, no we can't remember the other ones - an email to the usual address if you can) before chomping an energiser pill and turning the ghosts blue, enabling you to chomp them. Pac Man was pure, simple addiction.

The success of the game lead to a number of sequels, including one game that's arguably better than the original - Ms Pac Man is credited as being the single most popular videogame among females ever, and why the devil not? It's a brilliant game. It's also very fitting for us to give Pac Man his place in our Great Videogames Through The Ages Hall of Fame because, for the first time, he's been clocked.

It took 19 years, but finally somebody has achieved a perfect score on Pac Man. Billy Mitchell, a 33-year-old Fort Lauderdale resident and obviously a dedicated follower of the yella fella, achieved the highest possible score of 3,333,360 in 6 hours. This can only be achieved by eating, in addition to every pill and energiser pill, every fruit and every blue ghost in each of the 256 levels (at the 256th, the screen splits and half of it is pure white noise).