As the eerily familiar bleeps and bloops of video games past began emanating from my computer this morning, a friend nearby immediately recognized them and quipped that he’d spent “way too much time and brain cells playing that game”.
That game is Pac-Man and it’s featured in a playable Google Doodle for the next 48 hours on the Google homepage.
The search engine is celebrating the video game legend’s 30th birthday today (and tomorrow) with its first playable Google Doodle.
To give it a shot, simply go to Google.com and press the “Insert Coin” button, or wait a few seconds and the game will start up. If you hit the “Insert Coin” button again, Ms. Pac-Man will join in and you can have a second player play along using the WASD keys.
The doodle goes to good length to recreate the original Pac-Man experience, glitches and all, according to senior UX designer and developer Marcin Wichary:
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.
In its efforts to recreate the original, Google went so far as to include 255 playable levels, with the game glitching out on the 256th – just as it did in the original game.
Take a look at the game or go give it a shot for yourself.
