I wonder if any of you had a go at playing the Google Pac-Man game on the Google home page recently.
Pac-Man was designed by Toru Iwatani and first released in Japan on 22nd May 1980 by Namco. Google decided to honour Pac-Man’s 30th birthday by featuring a playable game on its home page, the first time that Google have ever done that.
Anyone who opened a Google home page from midnight on Friday, in the Japanese time zone of course found a fully functional scaled down version of Pac-Man.
“To pay the homage that Pac-Man deserves as a ground-breaking innovation in the gaming world, Google equipped the doodle with many unique characteristics from the original Pac-Man game,” said a Google spokesman.
“From preserving the distinct personalities of the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, to re-creating programming bugs from the original game, like a ‘kill screen’ on level 256, Marcin Wichary, a senior user experience designer at Google, and our resident Google doodler, Ryan Germick, remained as faithful to the spirit of Pac-Man as possible.”
Now sadly, not everyone was happy to see Pac-Man on the Google home page, not judging by the floods of comments on the Google help pages, most of them saying much and such the same thing.
“SHUT THE PAC MAN OFF!!! I used to have google as my home page, but I am changing that now AND i’m not using google to search for anything anymore until this thing is GONE. How dare you assault all of us in this manner? Are you nuts? This is not funny and you need to turn it off. This is the WORST KIND OF SPAM. An attack on everyone. SHAME ON GOOGLE” said one post.
“This LOGO PACMAN thing is most unexpected and annoying, and quirky in a very uncool way” said another unhappy surfer.
If I wanted a fully functional Pacman clone with 255 levels, I’d search for one” said another.
One was worried that it was a malicious move and wrote “Have you guys been hacked?” and yet another thought their own PC had been infected with a virus.
Well those who weren’t happy will now be pleased that Pac-Man has gone from the homepage, Google said they would only have it up for 48 hours.
Don’t worry if you missed it though and are wondering what all the fuss was about, you can still find Pac-Man online.
