For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors; peeking inside cabinets to learn 🌻 programming and engineering secrets; and—of course—free games!
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.
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 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).
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.