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.
