PAC-MAN



One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.Pac-Man was launched on May 22, 1980 in Japan. In October of that same year, it came to America and was an instant hit — America’s first blockbuster mainstream videogame.Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories—or meet PAC-MAN for the first time—through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds.



Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys)

Web users can still perform a search through the Google home page, but those who want to play the game have to click on the "Insert coin" button. Clicking that button twice allows you to play a two-player game, with one player taking the role of Miss Pac-Man, and controlling her progress using the W, A, S and D characters on the keyboard.Google said it had commissioned the doodle, its first ever interactive illustration, to mark the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man's release. Google said the launch of Pac-Man marked "a significant moment in popular culture", and said that web users had 48 hours to "re-live the nostalgia" of the 1980s by playing the game on the Google site.PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. You know, without actually needing any quarters.