The Ghost Monsters work for Mezmaron, who assigns them the job of finding the Power Pellet Forest. In the 1982 Pac-Man cartoon, the hero faced five Ghosts - four males wearing various styles of hats, and a female ghost named Sue, who wore earrings. Early promotional material would sometimes refer to the ghosts as 'monsters' or 'goblins'. When the game was exported to the United States, Midway Games instead changed their names to 'Shadow', 'Speedy', 'Bashful' and 'Pokey', their nicknames being changed to 'Blinky', 'Pinky', 'Inky' and 'Clyde' respectively. The original Japanese version of the game had the ghosts named 'Oikake', 'Machibuse', 'Kimagure' and 'Otoboke', translating respectively to 'chaser', 'ambusher', 'fickle' and 'stupid'. After being present with a 40 to 0 in favor of multicolored ghosts, Nakamura agreed to the decision. Although he was admittedly afraid of Nakamura, he conducted a survey with his colleagues that asked if they wanted single-colored enemies or multicolored enemies. Originally, all four of the ghosts were meant to be red instead of multicolored, as ordered by Namco president Masaya Nakamura - Iwatani was against the idea, as he wanted the ghosts to be distinguishable from one another. To prevent the game from becoming impossibly difficult or too boring to play, each of the ghosts were programmed to have their own distinct traits - the red ghost would directly chase Pac-Man, the pink and blue ghosts would position themselves in front of him, and the orange ghost would be random.

Their simplistic design was also attributed to the limitations of the hardware at the time, only being able to display a certain amount of colors for a sprite. Iwatani cited Casper the Friendly Ghost or Little Ghost Q-Taro as inspiration for the ghosts. In turn, he made the in-game characters cute and colorful, a trait borrowed from Iwatani's previous game Cutie Q (1979), which featured similar 'kawaii' characters. The idea for the ghosts was made from Iwatani's desire to create a video game that could attract women and younger players, particularly couples, at a time where most video games were 'war'-type games or Space Invaders clones. The ghosts were created by Toru Iwatani, who was the head designer for the original Pac-Man arcade game.

Pac man pinky cartoon