Enough with all the Pac-Man stuff, already! I mean, I like the game, but it’s far from my favorite.

Still, I have to mark this month’s 25th anniversary of the introduction of the arcade classic.

“This was the first time a player took on a persona in the game. Instead of controlling inanimate objects like tanks, paddles and missile bases, players now controlled a `living’ creature,” says Leonard Herman, author of “Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames.”"It was something that people could identify, like a hero.”

My first reading of that paragraph aroused skepticism in me; there had to be videogame characters that preceded the Pac. But, going strictly from memory, I guess there wasn’t, at least not in a truly identifiable sense: It was hard to give a Pong paddle or Space Invaders ship much of a personality.

Pac-Man was a more definable character, as evidenced by the ease with which spinoff storylines were launched for him. He and Mario from Donkey Kong/Mario Brothers fame were, really, the only enduring and mass-market characters to come out of the early videogaming days.