PAC-MAN

PAC-MAN (パックマン Pakkuman) is the star of the long-running PAC-MAN series beginning with the 1980 arcade game of the same name. He is a playable character in Super Smash Flash 2, after being "upgraded" from a simple Assist Trophy appearance, a trait he shares with Bandana Dee.

Character description
PAC-MAN's original design came when his creator Tōru Iwatani stated that the character's shape was inspired by a pizza missing a slice, however, he admitted in a 1986 interview that this was a half-truth and the character design also came from simplifying and rounding out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi (口). The original artwork used to promote the arcade game roughly represented him as a round, yellow being with large black eyes, a small nose, orange gloves and red shoes. This, however, wasn't kept consistent with the North American release, where PAC-MAN's design was considerably changed to a small blob-like yellow being with round red eyes and large nude feet. With he passing of the time, PAC-MAN would remain in his original design for all the releases of his games, with some minor changes. PAC-MAN was trained to be the protector for his home land, PAC-LAND, from the ghost that plague it, aided by the Super Pellets that allows him to eat the ghosts. He is also a gluttonous person, eating large amounts of food, that, within his series, can be considered usually a distraction. He also has a family which includes his wife Mrs. PAC-MAN, his son PAC-MAN Jr. and his daughter Baby PAC-MAN.'

In Super Smash Flash 2
On the May 29th, 2016 dev blog, PAC-MAN was revealed to be a playable character. His sprite design, along with his move set, is based on his appearance in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.

Years before this confirmation, though, PAC-MAN originally appeared in his classic 8-bit form as a pseudo-playable Assist Trophy, who could be controlled with the player's movement keys. PAC-MAN follows a straight path whenever a key pressed. Characters do continue to move though, so they must be careful while using PAC-MAN. Players could use PAC-MAN to chomp on opponents for high damage and knockback.

SSF2 Beta hoax
On the third day of the Apex 2015 McLeodGaming stream, Cleod9 "accidentally" opened the private build of the game revealing a character selection screen with PAC-MAN between Mega Man and Ichigo. Though this was at first believed to be an unintentional leak, it was later exposed that the render was taken from a former developer's DeviantArt account, proving the accidental leak was an intentional hoax done to mess with the fans—something that is further evidenced by the fact that the supposed render is of significantly lower quality than the rest of SSF2's character portraits. Even more condemning was the gameplay shown from said private build on stream which showed that PAC-MAN is, indeed, still an Assist Trophy. The infamous screenshot came back in a series of images uploaded on LightShot.com. This time however, it came accompanied with screenshots of the Steel Diver stage that had yet to be revealed at that time.

Assist Trophy
Beta

Trivia

 * PAC-MAN was the first Assist Trophy character in this game to be made a playable character in an official Super Smash Bros. game, that being in both Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. His appearance, however, was mostly based on his artwork appearance from the original game's cabinet.
 * However, this changed when PAC-MAN was shown to have become a playable character for Beta, making him one of two characters to switch from an Assist Trophy to a playable character, the other being Bandana Dee.