Rewind back to the days of classic video games. Imagine giant arcades games filled with flashing lights and electronic beeping. The sound of clinking quarters sliding into change slots mingling with laughter.

Such was the gaming world of the 1980s, and also a large part of “Ms. Pac-Man” video game legend Tom Asaki’s college experience. Asaki, an associate professor in the math department, graduated from WSU’s physics graduate program with a doctorate. Asaki and a few friends are widely considered the first people who were able to beat “Ms. Pac-Man.” The group, called the Bozeman Think Tank, includes Asaki, a physicist, and also a computer scientist and an engineer.

“It depends on who you ask, but some people would say that we were the first people to have cracked ‘Ms. Pac-Man’ to the point where you can play it to the end,” Asaki said. “I say, ‘It depends on who you ask,’ because video gamers have a certain ego to them.” Asaki said that when the game “Pac-Man,” was first popular, it didn’t interest him much. He said it was too simple and didn’t seem like fun.

However, one cold Montana winter in the early ‘80s, Asaki was introduced to the “Ms. Pac-Man” game that was in a local bar, which once served as the Wilsall town bank.

Asaki said he realized that “Ms. Pac-Man” was an entirely different game than “Pac-Man,” and he became incredibly interested.

The game of “Pac-Man” is simple, he said, because it can be beat after purchasing a guidebook and memorizing patterns of the game. On the other hand, “Ms. Pac-man,” has random elements designed to impede the gamer’s progress. A pattern guidebook for “Ms. Pac-Man” does not exist, he said.

“The difference between memorizing what will happen, and controlling what will happen, is the difference between ‘Pac-Man,’ and ‘Ms. Pac-Man,’” he said.

While at Montana State University, Asaki and the other members of the Bozeman Think Tank started playing “Ms. Pac-Man” very often. They began to understand how the game worked.

A physicist at heart, Asaki – who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before he began teaching at WSU – had always been interested in understanding how the universe works, he said.

Asaki said his interest in the universe of “Ms. Pac-Man” was of the same kind of interest. He said the game was like its own mini universe, which he could learn to manipulate. It was just the kind of thing, on a smaller scale, which he would eventually do at the national laboratory, he said. “A lot of these classic video games were just like that,” he said. “It was an entire universe, just smaller and simpler than ours. To be able to understand the entire universe of a video game is the challenge.” After much time spent in arcades, Asaki said he and his friends learned to understand the universe of “Ms. Pac-Man” and began to wonder how their high scores matched up to the best of the world’s gamers.

To accomplish this, they began reading the score listings in gaming magazines, as reported by Twin Galaxies, a large arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa. To this day Twin Galaxies is still a renowned score-keeping database for almost all video games. One day in 1983, Asaki obtained a “Ms. Pac-Man” score higher than had ever been published in the magazines. After sending it in, the Twin Galaxies, gaming-bigwig Billy Mitchell contacted Asaki. Mitchell is considered the first person to have achieved a perfect score in “Pac-Man.” The two met in Spokane, and Mitchell assessed Asaki’s legitimacy.

“The word, was that I was for real,” Asaki said.

He soon found himself in Ottumwa playing “Ms. Pac-Man” in front of Twin Galaxies’ owner Walter Day.

“I broke my own record right there in front of Walter, and that is the best thing you can do,” Asaki said. After that, and setting a record of 838 million points in the game of “Nibbler,” Asaki said he disappeared from the gaming world until 2008, when he joined a video gaming message board Web site.

Since joining, Hollywood moviemakers have interviewed him about his video gaming glory days, and he renewed his contact with Mitchell and Day.

Asaki said he sees his gaming experience as being a positive step toward the future he had as a physicist.

“I wouldn’t say it was “Ms. Pac-Man” that had inspired me to take the path, but it was a natural piece of that path,” he said.