So we built it from the ground up.Pac-Man has the highest brand awareness (94%)of any video game character among American consumers, according to the Davie-Brown Index and the game is still popular today. "I wanted to do the same thing we do with everything else at Google," Wichary said, "which is use modern Web technologies. Yet, rather than just getting code from Namco, they decided to do things the Google way. For a game that's 30 years old, it holds up remarkably well over time, and still has a hold on popular culture.Īnd as something that is still a hit so many years later, it made perfect sense to the Google team to break new ground with its approach to the Pac-Man project. In the end, the Google team put a lot of focus into re-building what is one of the best-known and recognized games of all time. Pac-Man, and both will be playing on the same board at the same time, using a single keyboard. In that case, one player will be Pac-Man and the other will be Ms. So where a single player will, so to speak, insert a single coin, clicking twice sets up a two-player game. On a normal day, Google's home page features two simple buttons: one for a full keyword-specific search and the famous "I'm feeling lucky" choice, which picks one result based on a keyword.įor the Pac-Man project, the team has converted the "I'm feeling lucky" button into an "Insert coin" slot, reminiscent of the place where countless kids have pumped billions of quarters over the years.įittingly, the team decided that if they were going to make their Pac-Man game authentic, they would need to make it playable by two people at once. Google, too, built that into its version, meaning that those who put some serious time into the game now will be able to make a lot of headway by figuring out the patterns that work best. In addition, Wichary pointed out that the original game was "deterministic," meaning that players could memorize and develop winning patterns. That was included in the Google version, as was a peculiarity that allowed Pac-Man to cut corners by a couple of pixels while the ghosts had to turn them at full right angles. Wichary said those include things like the fact that in the original game, the ghosts would give the slightest hint of which direction they were going to turn by moving their eyes that way. That, too, has been built into the Google version.Īnd the team was so focused on making their version true to the original that they even included some of the smallest touches possible, things that only the most serious Pac-Man players would know about. Similarly, after completing some levels of Pac-Man, a player would sit through brief animations, which came to be known as "coffee breaks," since it provided enough time to stretch one's fingers and, perhaps, grab a cup of coffee. And unlike most of the special logos, which disappear off the home page-but are available in perpetuity in the archives-when the day is over, the Pac-Man doodle will stay up for 48 hours. But for the Pac-Man celebration (see video below), Google has pulled out all the stops and has built, from scratch, a fully-playable version of the game, complete with 255 levels and re-created (but authentic) sounds and graphics. Until now, the most interactive of the logos had been one last Halloween that users could click to see more candy, and another for Isaac Newton's birthday that dropped apples. "When we became aware of the.anniversary," said Ryan Germick, a member of the Google Doodle team, "we thought it would be awesome to create not only something that references Pac-Man on the home page, but also something playable." But a few months ago, when the team discovered that May 22 would be the 30th anniversary of the release of Pac-Man in Japan-it was actually called Puck Man, but that name was rejected in the United States because of the propensity of the "P" to chip and look like an "F"-they knew they had to do something extra special.
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