New Pac-Man game on the way to celebrate 30th Pac-Manniversary

Hirokazu Yasuhara, who designed much of the original Sonic the Hedgehog at Sega and worked on Jak games and Uncharted for Naughty Dog, is now at Namco Bandai, and working on a new Pac-Man game, to celebrate the beloved circle's 30th anniversary in 2010.

Namco Bandai America's Makoto Iwai told Gamasutra, "As a group, we feel like we should do something to make him come back. So, there's one project that we started working on, and [Yasuhara is] part of it." Iwai said that the new game design was "sort of meeting his wish 100 percent, in a sense," referring to an earlier statement by Yasuhara that he wanted to make a new character action game.

Does Pac-Man's original maze-style gameplay count as "character action," or do we have a new Pac-Land sort of affair to look forward to? After the last Pac-Man game, we will eagerly devour whatever delicious fruit (by which we mean games) Namco Bandai sends out into the maze (by which we mean, um, the retail or downloadable market).