Google Celebrates 30 Years of Pac-Man With Logo Game
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CREDIT: Google |
It's quite normal for Google to celebrate famous birthdays, holidays and special occasions with special versions of the Google logo. What's unusual today is that the logo celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Pac-Man arcade game is also a full-functioning game.
Pac-Man is one of the games ranked up there with Space Invaders, Tetris and Super Mario Bros. as an icons of the early days of video games . In order to honor Pac-Man, Google commissioned a special logo to appear on the main search page that inserts Google's name into the old maze-like playing field of Pac-Man.
People were surprised to learn that clicking on the "Insert Coin" button, which replaces the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, makes the logo transform into a fully playable version of the classic game. Using the direction or arrow keys on any keyboard, visitors to Google can direct Pac-Man around the Google logo, eating dots and avoiding ghosts just like the original.
Clicking twice on the "Insert Coin" button turns it into a two-player game, with the second player controlling Miss Pac-Man, the successor to the original Pac-Man game. The second player uses the W, A, S and D keys to control Miss 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," a Google spokesman told the Telegraph.
"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."
