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A Playable PAC-MAN On Google Doodle
Kilrah_il and several other readers made sure we noted Google's tribute to PAC-MAN on its 30th anniversary — a playable game implemented in JavaScript. "'To play the game, go to google.com 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.' There is also an Easter egg for those who want to recall one of the first multi-player games, but you'll have to RTFA to find it." This doodle may overshadow the Official PAC-MAN 30th Anniversary Destination.
I Don't wanna read the article, how to activate the easter egg ?
If you have a friend on hand (or some serious ambidextrous skills....) click "Inser Coin" twice and use the WASD keys to control MsPacman!
"...So I hung back and lurked. For 18 months. Can't beat a good old-fashioned lurking."
I'm holding out for Q-Bert.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Yes, you can "beat" each level and keep playing, as in tradtional pacman. Yes, the animated sequences between particular levels are there.
Also, note the "I'm feeling lucky" button has become "insert coin"
I saw this earlier this morning. Obviously, productivity around the globe dropped 30% today.
Google handled approx 88 billion searches in Dec-2009. (88b/31)*2=5.67billion searches in two days. If (conservativly) one tenth of those are work related, that's 567m. If one in ten work related users plays this once for 60 seconds, that's 3.4 billion seconds. 3.4 billion seconds is approximatly 108 person-years worth of productivity. (Which at US federal minimum wage is about 1.6 million dollars). That's a low figure as those who need google to work probably don't earn minimum wage. Now that's power! I personally played for more than 60s....
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Works on Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13
ONLY sound on Firefox 3.6.3
And Google has the BEST programmers !
Yours In Smolensk,
K. Trout
I would say they certainly have the most productive to throw us a cool freebie like that. However I still prefer Pac-Man CE (championship edition) on XBLA.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Is this game too hard to play?
The point is the celebration of a load bearing pillar in gaming history, not the fact that JavaScript was used to do it.
Living With a Nerd
Works just fine for me using Firefox 3.6.3 on Win7.
The productivity of IT industry worldwide has recently collapsed after Google has managed to inject a time-consuming activity into the web browsers of its competitors' employees.
Ezekiel 23:20
Here's the discussion
Pac Man.
Cheers
Exactly. How many people knew Pacman was 30 years old today? Probably not a lot. How many people know about Pacman? Quite a few. It's a fun gesture to educate people how much things have changed, bringing back the nostalgic feeling of playing the game while showing how far we've come, with web searches and the internet in general. I think it spurs some reflection on the subject matter, but thats just my experience.
I'm using Firefox 3.6.3 on Slackware 13 and it works just fine.
Easily the coolest Google Doodle of all time.
Yes, it works on iPhone. Not very well, mind you, but it is controllable with swipes.
Have a Nice Day, Adobe!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Works here on Firefox 3.6.3 (Mac). Maybe you're blocking the javascript?
Noticed it at work this morning.
Told a few people.
Poster should note that there is SOUND!
Sporadically every now and then I hear Pac-Man going on a few cubes away. lol.
Mute your sound before going to Google if your in an Office setting... Unless they are cool enough to let you play video games at work. My bosses are a bit sticky about that.
That is the fastest game of Pac Man I think I've every played. I think I cleared the board in about 3 minutes. Fun times.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
From the point of view of a serious organization, I don't think it was such a good choice - a large part of Google's audience are people who just use the computer to work, can barely use it, and any deviation from standard behavior prompts panic and a call to help desk (us!) to ask why the hell did the computer start making noises and playing games by itself, and how we should run there to run an antivirus check and preferably take the computer outside and burn it with a flame thrower lest the nasty virus spread through the network and wreak havoc in the organization.
From the point of view of a geeky videogame addict, I'd say it kicks ass. And people who get too concerned with it should get a life. Or maybe play a game or two :)
It's not entirely done in JavaScript - they have an off-screen Flash applet that handles the sound.
I can hear many of my staff playing as I write this.
Ah, well!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Pac-Man CE is awesome, but try pressing Insert Coin a second time and use WASD along with the arrows. You are now dual-wielding Pac-Man.
Having an "alarm sound" in google home page is not that wise decision, I got reports about people calling helpdesk tech support in order to report an "alarm sound", "its a virus?", "hijacked google home page, please run anti-spyware", etc, etc
Is PacMan that important to the general public? I agree is /. material, but for non-tech people I dont think it matters...
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
It's also the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back today.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
You can hear your staff playing video games while you post on Slashdot? But I thought 3DRealms folded?
And I want to run a game programmed in Javascript on my computer WHY? I helped write a simulator for a PDP-10 that ran on a PDP-11 (36 bit machine on a 16 bit machine) 30+ years ago. And there was a concrete corporate need for it (we were modifying the Bliss-11 compiler which was written in Bliss-10). And even though I like PacMan (lord knows how many quarters I plugged into it at the local video game parlors in the 80's) I would still pause before I open my machine(s) up to running Javascript games.
If only from the simple perspective that an interpreted, garbage collected language (such as Javascript) is inherently less efficient than a compiled language (C, Pascal, whatever) -- and it therefore is going to burn more CPU cycles than are required to perform the functionality the game provides. AND IT IS THEREFORE NOT GREEN!
The goal of programmers (world-wide) should not be on "how do I implement something clever and cool". It should instead be on how do I reduce the CO2 footprint of my program? It is a sad state when one is promoting programs which may increase wasteful expenditure of energy (via Javascript). If /. is a "good" forum, should they not be promoting good directions?
Ditto on the OS?Browser combo here. According to page 6 of the Mozilla support ticket for this says the "cool previews" add-on is causing the only sound issue.
How many people knew The Empire Strikes Back was 30 years old today? Probably not a lot. How many people know about The Empire Strikes Back? Quite a few. It's a fun gesture to educate people how much things have changed, bringing back the nostalgic feeling of watching the movie while showing how far we've come, with web searches and the internet in general. I think it spurs some reflection on the subject matter, but thats just my experience.
It's impressive for the same reason that building a trebuchet out of popsicle sticks and rubber bands or making music with Tesla coils is impressive, even though the trebuchet could never knock down a castle and the song could never win a Grammy. Had you ever written so much as a Hello World, you would realize that.
And no, you weren't just trolling to get a rise out of the Slasdotters. You really were trying to make yourself feel better by shitting on an accomplishment that for all its technical modesty is far beyond your potential. And it isn't working.
One lingering questions about this: Did Google have to get permission from copyright holders to make this game? I'm assuming that it would be a no-brainer to let google create this game, because anyone with a financial interest in the game would certainly welcome a free ad of this magnitude, but what are the rights of Namco, et. al. regarding this now 30 year old game? Do they still "own" the game-proper? What about the soundtrack?
The kicker is there's even a kill screen after stage 255. That's some serious dedication right there.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Some people think it's a virus :)
I've seen a Firefox/iGoogle setup with CoolPreview and indeed the music is audible but the game is not to be seen in iGoogle which would lead to justifiable speculation from some users.
Set my mind to blown Sir.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Well, if Pacman isn't your cup of tea, there's always Quake II in your browser.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Also after 30 years it's still lagging like it was a state of the art game that's impressive.
Way back in the 1980s, well before you mother shit you out of her rotten womb, I developed games for the Atari and the NES. I personally worked with and know quite well many of the people who pioneered the gaming industry.
Although almost all of us have been retired for some time, we still keep tabs on how game development is done today. Whenever we have a few beers together, we always laugh at how pathetic JavaScript "developers" are, especially when they try to create games.
Their language makes the shitty assembly languages we dealt with look enjoyable. Their convoluted web "platform" makes shitty 8-bit CPUs look simple. But the funniest thing is that they still can't even do what we did 30 years ago. They're still struggling to recreate the games we created way back then. And they can't do it! Their games run so slowly on modern computers. It's hilarious!
Thanks google. This just started an argument in my office. My boss and 7 other "engineers" laughed at me when I said it was done in JavaScript.
"You can't write games in JavaScript."
"But it's a .js file."
"You can't script games!."
"But..I can show you the code.. and 50 other games written in JavaScript."
"You're an idiot."
Sigh...
None of that is true, and even you can't successfully convince yourself of it.
No kidding. I have headphones plugged in always, even when I'm not using them. That way when I click on a troll link, I'm the only one that will hear, "Hey, everybody! I'm looking at gay porno!"
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
In that case, it is a shame they did not do the sounds using HTML5. It would be nice to a reworked version using HTML Audio.
I've been told HTML5's <audio> has five deficiencies:
I could be wrong; feel free to post links to web sites demonstrating how to overcome these deficiencies.
:( :(
I guess javascript is junk after all ? ;)
DAMN GOOGLE! now I have a quarter crammed into my LCD.
Wow a textbook definition of a redundant comment, good enough to be take as a textbook example even.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Donkey Kong will be awesome next year!!!
I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.) and I had no idea it was Pac-Man's 30th anniversery today!
Thanks google!
BTW, if anyone has book 3 or 5 of the Pac-Man cross stitch patterns then I'd love to have them! (I have books 1, 2, 4, and 6.).
Cow Cube
Despite what you may have been told when you were a kid, your level of approval holds approximately zero value for anybody.
But do go on fortifying your stick in the mud. We'll leave it right where it is. Promise.
Anyway, the point here was "Fun," I believe. As much as Google's monolithic structure worries me, they do know how to let their employees out to stretch their Happy! That improves the world.
So Thumbs Up. I just spent fifteen minutes eating dots and loving it!
-FL
even cooler would be if they would save the top 10 highest scores.
I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.)
Even as a married man, you'll always be a virgin.
They said they have the original bugs, I found that if you eat ghosts that are right next to each other, it will only eat one of them. Did anyone find the easter egg yet?
Project any harder and you'll be able to show movies.
I'm sure that's why they saved it for Friday.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
..and shockingly, the mods didn't give it "-1 Offtopic" instead.
When shit like this makes the front page...it just makes /. even more of a joke.
Fox News > Slashdot
sad but true..
I've been a programmer for a few years but within the last 8 months have been working on a project using Javascript.
I've been struggling with forms and trees and autocompletes and getting the css to look the same across all browsers and then I see that.
I'm amazed at what they were able to do in Javascript...if I had 1/10th of that skill I'd be done with my project by now.
Clearly it's time for me to put in an application at McDonald's...
It's a trap! They're just trying to encourage greater uptake of Google Chrome! 'cause it plays like crap in Firefox with a lot of tabs open, but is very smooth in Chrome, with the V8 engine underneath it.
Those evil evil Googlers...
Also, I wonder if by just going ahead and replacing functionality of the second biggest button on a screen Google accepts (or is going to find out as part of this experiment) that "I'm feeling lucky" button is completely useless?
Save Complete Page in Firefox doesn't get even close to all the pieces. This must be preserved, to be played every year on May 21st. Is there a save Addon that can get it all automatically or do I have to spelunk in my cache?
I work as a Help Desk Tech and just had a user call to say that every page on the internet has the sounds of Pacman.
He just had extra tabs of google open in his browser.
...And yet it's still very likely cooler than anything you've ever accomplished.
Seriously, I'm sure that the engineers at Google had about 2,741,288 more productive things they could have been doing than this, but they did it anyway because it was fun. It was probably some guy that that churned it out in his spare time. It sure is easy to cast stones at other people's endeavors from your comfortable armchair, isn't it? Tell you what, get off your butt and do something you think is neat in your spare time, let us pick it apart for being "meh" compared to professionally developed products, and then we'll see if you are so quick to criticize again.
This doodle may overshadow the Official PAC-MAN 30th Anniversary Destination.
Yes, because google.com can handle being /.ed, pacman.com not so much.
It's not just a productivity issue. Some users are also panicking that the Pacman game could be the result of a virus.
Sophos has reported on the scare at http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/05/21/panic-pacman-virus-infected-google/, although personally I prefer the bit of their blog post where they describe *genuine* game-related viruses from the past.
OK, I am pretty stupid about these things, so how can I save the Javescript to my computer to play when it disappears from the Google web page?
I think you played a different Google Pacman than I did. Granted, the layout is "bad", but that's because it has to spell out the company name. Other than that, the ghosts seemed to generally chase as well as the originals and they absolutely did not "stay blue forever".
Somebody else mentioned that the ghosts stay blue forever in 2-player mode. I haven't tested this (and if I did, I don't know when I'd be able to get an answer to you) but certainly, if I get a power pellet and then go somewhere the ghosts won't come and find me, they will stay blue for several minutes at least.
The main difference to me is that it felt like the game was in slow motion (including Pacman) but that might just be the size.
This may be due to the turbo settings that tend to be configured on a lot of the coin-op games. A lot of the machines you'll see out there play faster than the originals. My local movie theater has one of the Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machines, and in that, right from the first level, Ms. Pac Man is fast. In the newer machines I think it's a configuration bit you can set - in the older ones I believe the faster gameplay came from hacked ROMs and so on. (I don't know all the history, really.)
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm a serious collector of Pac-Man memorabilia (I once paid over $100 for a box of Pac-Man cereal and my wedding next month will be Pac-Man themed.) and I had no idea it was Pac-Man's 30th anniversary today!
Did you ever get those Pac-Man candies they had in the early 1980s, where the different-shaped candies were all contained in a blister-pack "maze" and to get the candy out you had to navigate it through the maze?
Bow-ties are cool.
flaimebait? naah. if i had modpoints, i'd give you some. that shit was funny.
oh, and funny how your username coincides with your comment. only on /.
An image of google's pacman killscreen: http://digg.com/d31RlwW
Odd, I get no sound in my Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2.0.4 in my updated, 64-bit Windows HP. But I do get them in IE8. What is it using for audio?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The doodle should also track how many hours of productivity and money are lost playing it.
There is also an Easter egg for those who want to recall one of the first multi-player games, but you'll have to RTFA to find it.
aww man, so nobody on Slashdot will ever know what the Easter egg is!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
It's amazing how much Pac-Man junk there is out there! I have Pac-Man roller skates, trash cans, stickers, sleeping bags, vitamins, keychains, board games, a phone, a radio, a sled, bed sheets, many types of glasses, many types of toys, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It all looks great on display in my rec room!
Cow Cube
Says "celibate for life".
<sig> </sig>
I just reproduced the "blue forever" bug in 2 player mode (it's pretty obvious how to trigger it), but have yet to see it in the normal mode.
I still say the ghost AI is pretty close.
I just reproduced the "blue forever" bug in 2 player mode (it's pretty obvious how to trigger it), but have yet to see it in the normal mode.
I still say the ghost AI is pretty close.
Yeah, I bet it is... From the various articles it sounds like they tried to reproduce the original ghost movements (which are well-known among avid players, fairly predictable) - but with the different maze layout they fall into predictable patterns...
As for the 2-player power pellet bug - I guess I missed something. I didn't think you had to do anything special to trigger it....
Bow-ties are cool.
Pac-Man follows your mouse click.
If you hit INSERT COIN twice it starts 2-player mode (Mr. and Mrs.). Use WASD for the second player and arrow keys for the first!
Google's code ninjas have outdone themselves. TX-1 please!
I think it's just fun.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I just see the game screen but cannot do a thing. (I don't have many add-ons)
Works fine with Opera.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
I assume that it will be on their site which has the collection of Doodles they did the past few years: http://www.google.com/logos/
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
You're welcome http://www.mediafire.com/?kml3oz0mwyy
Pac-Man has a permanent home now at Google. google.com/pacman havefun buzzintechnology.com