How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

That or he uses binary fission or some other sort of cellular division. (Hey, that rhymes.)

1. Like frogs - Pac-Man mounts Ms. Pac-Man in a pond or stream. Ms. Pac-Man releases her eggs into the water. Pac-Man simultaneously releases sperm which fertilizes the eggs.

2. Like fish (eg. freshwater bass species) - Ms. Pac-Man deposits eggs in a nest dug out of gravel. Pac-Man comes along soon thereafter and releases sperm to fertilize the eggs.

3. Like barnacles - Pac-Man has an extremely long, prehensile penis which he extends over the distance between himself and Ms. Pac-Man.

4. Like parthenogenic haplodiploid lizards - Ms. Pac-Man does not require fertilization at all. Her diploid zygotes develop into females, and her haploid zygotes develop into males. Because of an interesting evolutionary holdover, she does require sterile copulation ("going through the motions") with a male (Pac-Man) to ovulate.

5. They don't - They're just good friends.

shakes his head

It's kind of sad. Anyway, I've heard that recently, taking those 'power pills' has become more of a necessity than a fun pastime experience.

I propose the theory that Pac-beings reproduce via a form of pollenisation that requires humans as the carrier. Think about it. Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man always inhabit seperate arcade cabinets. Therefore they cannot come into physical contact. A player comes along, and responding to the game's attract sequence (similar in principle to the colourful flowers and courtship displays found elsewhere in nature) and inserts a coin into the machine. On entering the workings of the machine, this coin will be charged with Pac-Man sex cells. These are released when the Pac-Man dies. The score counter indicates the amount of nutrition that the 3 Pac-Men controlled by the player have accumulated from eating pills and ghosts, and this corresponds to the amount of sex cells they can produce (this is why the player is encouraged to acheive a high score).

Eventually all the coins will be removed from the machine and returned to circulation - however, only a few of those will make it back into a Ms. Pac-Man cabinet (this is why Pac-Man is such an addicitive game - to extract the maximum number of coins from the human carrier). We can follow this reproduction process statistically. New Pac-Men and Ms. Pac-Men only ever appear from the machine when coins are put in. If the amount of coins decreases, the cabinet is removed from the arcade - that Pac-Ecosystem has failed.

Maybe this unsatisfactory method of reproduction explains why Pac-Man is perpetually popping pills.

True, there is a Baby Pac-man, but this alone is not sufficient evidence to conclude that said baby is the progeny of Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man.

If we are to believe that Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man are indeed a mated pair of creatures that reproduce in some recognizable fashion, it would follow logically that both Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man should have been likewise born from a previous generation of their species.

Yet, we have no evidence of any kind to indicate that such a prior generation ever existed.

I believe that the most likely conclusion is that, much like the Christian idea of the Trinity, Pac-man, Ms. Pac-man and Baby Pac-man simply exist, and perhaps always have and always will.

They certainly exhibit many traits normally associated with the divine. They interact exclusively with each other and with ghosts, they eat some sort of magical food that is unavailable to mortals (see ambrosia and nectar), they communicate in a language that is incomprehensible to humans, and they have a vast cult following of people who donate money to their temples and spend hours in meditative practice in the hopes that their devotion will give them the ability to influence the actions of the holy Pac-family.