#GOOGLE PAC MAN FULL#

Namco Bandai President and CEO Kenji Hisatsune.

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.

#GOOGLE PAC MAN FULL#

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. Google made sure to build that experience into their game. For example, though many people would never have experienced this, the original arcade game had a bug that resulted in anyone making it past the 255th level hitting what came to be called the 'kill screen,' where the machine essentially crashed. That commitment to authenticity extended, Wichary explained, to some of Pac-Man's little quirks. From those humble beginnings came a lifetime of interest in games and, now, the motivation and passion to make the Pac-Man project be as faithful as possible to the original game. His father was a game technician who used to take him around to arcades and let him see how the various machines worked. Being a Google home page logo, it had to have the word 'Google' in its design, so Wichary, Germick and their colleagues built their version of Pac-Man so that it had the search engine's name in the middle of the iconic board.įor Wichary, who grew up in Poland, arcade video games were in his blood. 'Īnd in the end, Wichary made a 'picture-perfect' version of the game, Germick said. 'With this being the first time Google has ever included sound or made a doodle playable demonstrates just how big of an impact Pac-Man has made. 'We are very excited about the Google doodle project,' Namco Bandai President and CEO Kenji Hisatsune told CNET by e-mail. Yet the Google team, with the inspirational lead of Marcin Wichary, a Google senior user experience designer, built their version of the game from the ground up using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. 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.Īccording to Germick, the company worked with Pac-Man's publisher, Namco Bandai, to make the project as realistic as possible. 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.' In each case, the Google Doodle team works on a special logo that appears on the search engine's home page.īut 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. Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the release of Pac-Man, and to commemorate the occasion, Google is rolling out its first-ever truly interactive and playable home page logo, a fully-functional version of the iconic 1980s video game.įor years, Google has produced its so-called doodles for all kinds of holidays and special occasions, from Valentine's Day to the Fourth of July to Mother's Day and many others.

Google pac man