Pac-Man Trademarks: Expanding Your Brand

When you first obtain a trademark registration for certain goods, you may want to later expand your business beyond your original goods and services. To do this, just file additional trademark applications for the new goods that you want to cover. You must file additional applications for any new goods to which you want to apply the trademark, because you can’t add to existing trademark applications.

After a number of years, you may end up with a big portfolio of trademark registrations protecting products and services that are far beyond the scope of your original products.

Let’s talk about how to expand trademark coverage for your brand, I’m Angela Langlotz, trademark and copyright attorney. I’m going to spend the next three minutes discussing this. If you have trademark and copyright law questions, drop them into the comments below. I will answer them on a future live.

So sometimes people come to me and they say, “Angela, what if later I start expanding my brand to include other products and services? Can I add to my trademark application to cover those things?” And the answer is no. You cannot add to an existing trademark application or an existing registration. But what you can do is file new trademark applications for the new goods and services with which you’ll be using your brand. Let’s have a look at an example of a company that has done just that over the years.

Now, I know that you’ll all recognize the iconic Pac-Man video game, and that started quite a number of years ago, about 40 years ago, probably maybe even longer.

And since Pac-Man first got its trademark on video game cartridges, they have gradually over the years expanded the scope of their trademark to include other products as well. Let’s have a look. So here is the list of live Pac-Man trademarks and you can see down here they’ve got 36 live registrations.

Let’s look at the first one, the very first one that was issued in 1981. OK, so 40 years ago and it was issued for video game cartridges. We can see it right here. We can see their date of first use. The date of first use was 1981. We can see that right here. But they didn’t actually get the trademark registered until 1984. So there was a process for them apparently to do that. But that was their first trademark.

And then the second one was for the actual video game machine, the coin-operated video games themselves. And that was issued in 1983. So that was actually the first one that got issued, although they applied for the video game cartridges earlier. So what have they expanded their brands to now? There’s a pinball machine we can see here. They expanded it to pinball machines; in 2005, they filed for those. So we’ve gone from new school to old school. We’ve gone from video games to pinballs. So that’s kind of interesting.

Let’s see what else they filed more recently. It looks like they now have a Pac-Man cafe. So Pac-Man has moved into amusement centers. So they’ve gone from being just a video game to being a whole darned amusement center, probably chock full of Pac-Man games and memorabilia. And maybe it’s a cafe. Who knows? I’ve never seen one.

But you can see how brands can evolve over time when they become catchy in the public conscience. So this started out as the video game, became very popular, and now it’s in pinballs and other arcade games. And, you know, I’ve seen Pac-Man clothing and now they have a Pac-Man cafe. So even though the kids that are alive today didn’t grow up with Pac-Man like we all did, it’s still very much part of our consciousness, at least here in the United States, at least here in the West.

So that’s a very interesting look at a venerable brand that has expanded its reach over time. I’m Angela Langlotz. I come here to answer your trademark and copyright law questions. If you have those, drop them into the comments below. You can find me on Facebook at Facebook, dot com forward slash TrademarkDoctor. I’m on the net at TrademarkDoctor.net and you can find me on YouTube.

at video dot TrademarkDoctor.net forward slash YouTube. I’ve got almost 500 videos there.

We’re going to have a little party, a little celebration when I get to 500, and I will see you on the next video.

I’m on Facebook! “Like” my facebook page,  to be notified every time I go LIVE. Do you have trademark questions? Message me on the Trademark Doctor Facebook page, and I’ll answer your questions on a future Live video.

Contact Dallas, Texas trademark attorney Angela Langlotz today to get started on a trademark application for your valuable brand.