Play Pac-Man on Google's Home Page Logo Today

[Rugles]

Office productivity is going to tank today.

[Brett_Tabke]

that is pretty good.

[Rugles]

Turn on your speakers and get the old school Pacman sounds too.

[StoutFiles]

Very cool. I'm assuming this was made in Javascript?

[travelin cat]

Great. Now nothing is going to get finished around here today.

So what's your high score?

[helpnow]

7900, but I stopped. Gotta get back to work...

[LifeinAsia]

Gotta get back to work...

What kind of priorities are those? :)

[tedster]

...the Pacman Google logo is unique in that it is the first playable Google Doodle.

According to Google, the Pacman logo has a total of 256 levels. Users can click the "Insert Coin" button to get the game going, or click it twice to kick-off a two-player game...

Pacman will be up on Google for a total of 48 hours--from 8AM PT on Friday through Sunday morning. The programmer behind the Pacman Doodle was reportedly the son of a game and pinball technician and used to accompany his father to arcade parlors and help him tinker with the games.

Huffington Post article [huffingtonpost.com]

[arizonadude]

Be interesting to see how many users think it's really annoying to have the music play when I hit Google. I could care less about the birth of Pac Man.

[SEOMike]

CNET is reporting that the playable pacman on Google's homepage is getting the search engine banned from some work networks including Miami-Dade County because their policy bans recreational games on their network. Oops.

CNET Article [news.cnet.com]

[wheel]

OK, I take back everything bad I've said about Google. This is the old school Google cool innovation.

[johnser]

I'm leaving a voicemail for an important client and then......bang! Loud unexpected background music that sounds like I'm calling said important client from a phone booth in a smoky arcade circa 1981 while fondling all the nice coins in my hand ready to have another go..... Any chance of space invaders next Friday lads?

[Suleman]

Yet i open google page for search i saw that logo looking nice.

[johnnie]

Brilliant!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Great use of sprites, and proof that they work. Right click and view image on that bad boy.

[Robert Charlton]

That's one addictive logo. I wonder how it will affect search volume. ;)

Here's the Official Google Blog article...

Celebrating PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/celebrating-pac-mans-30th-birthday.html
[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[httpwebwitch]

Bravo!

[webastronaut]

Could be a play on Bing?

Go to Bing and forget about what you want to search for because you're caught up on the homepage picture links.
Look at all the Bing TV ads.... Bing and Decide. It's easier to just Google a search.

[rowtc2]

Very nice idea. Thanks G!

[arizonadude]

At least when I go to bing, I don't get stupid music playing.

That reminds me of some very early websites the were far from appealing.

Google is assuming the masses of people who use Google are in love with the Pac Man, but I doubt any serious business people enjoy cheesy music with a page that looks like a first grader made it.

[pontifex]

Brilliant and annonying at the same time... yet more proof that the smart boys do not understand the impact of their work fully!

[Asia_Expat]

I removed Google as my default page, in order to get rid of the infuriating sound. It starts automatically, what the f#%$ were they thinking?! Idiots.

[BillyS]

Best Google ever!

[thegreatpretender]

Wow! adwords credit for the top ten highest scorers. :)

[J_RaD]

ploy to get some traffic.

[jaffstar]

It's brilliant, try 2 player :)

[mssfldt]

Hi,
I like that doodle very much too. But did everybody noticed the firefox-bug?
FF-User with the addOn CoolPreviews have the "doodle-sound" when starting the browser - without opening the google homepage. Its a kind of ghost-sound. And not a small problem, seems that some million user worldwide use coolPreviews.
Thats why google yesterday included a "sound on/off" version with "off" as default.
Today its again the version without sound - don't know why.
Someone wrote in my blog that FF called it one of the greatest "Google bugs" - but I haven't read an official note by Mozilla. We will see
Greetings, Martin

[tedster]

Google made the Pac-man game available permanently [google.com]

[pontifex]

Great - another example how Google snipers traffic away from webmasters:

1st: a live ticker with all the news links to the google permanent pacman url, pushing down the natural results by around 200 pixels

2nd: a link to an ad laden site with doubleclick ads (who owns doubleclick again?)

3rd: more pages with heavy (maximum allowed) google ads in the results

4th: NAMCO (Bandai) the inventor, seller (and copyright owner, I guess) to the original game can not be found for either "pacman" or "pac man" on the first 2 SERPs - and they have the domain pacman.com, btw.

what a search engine - sorry to be such a whiny jerk, but I wonder, if that playful corporate culture of G is getting out of hands?

P!

[Lame_Wolf]

The Pac-Man game Google put on its home page gobbled up almost five million hours of work time, suggests a study.

[news.bbc.co.uk...]