Krayon has spent nearly a decade building one of the most intellectually rigorous identities in independent watchmaking. From Everywhere to Anywhere to Anyday, every creation has orbited the same philosophical axis—man's relationship with natural light, celestial cycles, and the poetic mechanics of lived time. So when Krayon announces a PAC-MAN collaboration, the instinct is to pause. Not because the idea lacks charm, but because the brand has earned its reputation precisely by resisting charm in favor of substance.
The question isn't whether Krayon can execute this—it's whether it should. To Krayon's credit, the answer is more nuanced than the headline suggests.
Things to Know About the Watch
The Krayon PAC-MAN series is the result of a collaboration with Bandai Namco Entertainment, Inc., in a limited edition of 15 unique pieces in PT950 platinum, each fitted with an onyx dial and hand-painted sapphire discs depicting ghosts, fruit, and the iconic yellow character himself. The 39 mm case measures 9.5 mm thick with a 30-meter water resistance—dimensions consistent with the existing Anywhere collection.
The collaboration marks PAC-MAN's 45th anniversary and is deeply personal to Krayon's founding duo. Fei Hou, born in Beijing in 1986, played the game alone on her family's first computer. Rémi Maillat, born in Switzerland in 1984, discovered it in the electric atmosphere of European arcades. Two childhoods, two cultures, one shared memory, and now, a 15-piece platinum series that channels that nostalgia into Krayon's latest Métiers d'Art statement.
The conceptual hook is genuinely clever. Krayon's Anywhere complication tracks sunrise and sunset for a user-defined location using rotating discs. Here, PAC-MAN replaces the sun indicator on the 24-hour chapter, advancing around the dial as the day progresses. Dots and fruit appear according to sunrise timing, the "great cookie" marks sunset and triggers night mode, and at midnight the ghost gang turns blue — faithful to the game's original power-up logic. On equinox days, the layout becomes perfectly symmetrical: twelve hours of day, twelve of night.
The aesthetic stays true to the original 1980’s arcade game. The maze is rendered in translucent tampography on the polished onyx dial, visible only when light hits at a precise angle. Ghosts and fruit are hand-painted, and all typography adopts the pixelated lettering of the arcade era. Each of the 15 pieces varies in ghost positioning and fruit arrangement, making every watch a unique composition.
It is well done. But one wonders whether Krayon, a maison that has distinguished itself through restraint and intellectual seriousness, needed to reach for a pop-culture license to demonstrate creative maturity. The press language frames this as Krayon learning to "smile," though nothing about Anywhere Aurora or the Arborea Métiers d'Art series suggested a house incapable of joy.
The Movement
Powering the Krayon PAC-MAN is the manual-wound Calibre C030, the same movement from the Anywhere collection. The patented architecture calculates sunrise and sunset mechanically for any location on Earth. It runs at 21,600 vph (3 Hz), delivers 72 hours of power reserve, and comprises 432 components and 55 jewels. The movement is not new here, and that is actually one of the strongest arguments for the piece. The complication's disc-based display architecture lends itself naturally to the PAC-MAN translation, requiring no mechanical compromise.
Summary & Price
The Krayon PAC-MAN is a technically sound and visually delightful reinterpretation of one of the finest astronomical complications in contemporary watchmaking. The execution is unmistakably Krayon. Whether the collaboration elevates or simply accessorizes the brand's identity is a conversation worth having and one that will likely be settled by what comes next, not by this release alone.
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