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Classic Games (Games) Google Games

A Playable PAC-MAN On Google Doodle 286

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.
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A Playable PAC-MAN On Google Doodle

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  • by AntiDragon ( 930097 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:29AM (#32294688)

    If you have a friend on hand (or some serious ambidextrous skills....) click "Inser Coin" twice and use the WASD keys to control MsPacman!

  • Meh (Score:5, Funny)

    by swanzilla ( 1458281 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:29AM (#32294694) Homepage
    I'm holding out for Q-Bert.
    • Re:Meh (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheKidWho ( 705796 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:34AM (#32294770)

      Don't worry, in 7 years we'll be playing Crysis in the google doodle.

  • Productivity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iPhr0stByt3 ( 1278060 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:31AM (#32294712)
    I saw this earlier this morning. Obviously, productivity around the globe dropped 30% today.
  • Productivity (Score:5, Informative)

    by FalconZero ( 607567 ) * <`FalconZero' `at' `Gmail.com'> on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:31AM (#32294724)
    Google handled approx 88 billion searches in Dec-2009 [searchengineland.com]. (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....
    • by dlgeek ( 1065796 )
      Yes, but perhaps you made up for it by spending less time on /. or digg or browsing the web. Most workers who are on computers all day don't sit there working for every second of it - a 60 second break doesn't really affect my productivity, and I take many of them throughout the day. It's time to let the brain process stuff in the background so I can look at my task with renewed focus when I'm done.
    • Now let's calculate how much potential productivity is lost to Facebook. So, let's see: from Facebook's own statistics [facebook.com] it's users spend over 500 billion minutes per month. Assuming a very conservative 5% of that time could/should be spent being productive (the other 95% we'll assume is a reasonable quantity of recreation), that's 25 billion minutes a month. Divide by 60 for hours, divide my 40 for work week, divide by 51 for year, divide by 45 for a lifetime of work and...

      Over 4,500 entire lifetimes of pote

  • Is this game too hard to play?
    • The control scheme is pretty complicated and you do also have to keep track of 4 ghosts at the same time you are moving around. Those damn Namcoers are too smart for their own good.

  • FYI iPhone (Score:5, Informative)

    by peacefinder ( 469349 ) <alan.dewitt@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:46AM (#32294914) Journal

    Yes, it works on iPhone. Not very well, mind you, but it is controllable with swipes.

    Have a Nice Day, Adobe!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by QUILz ( 1043102 )

      Have a nice day indeed, since it still uses a Flash object for sounds.

      • Hah! Good catch.

        I am in such a habit of silencing such things that I hadn't even noticed. But you're right, it was silent without me doing anything about it. (Of course, for me that's a feature, but YMMV.)

    • by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      I was going to ask you how you got to it on the iPhone since by default you're sent to the Mobile Google page, but I found the "Classic" link on the bottom. And what do you know, it does in fact work on iPhone. Cool.

      ...Until the browser decided I double-tapped while trying to move around a couple of corners to avoid a ghost, and zoomed in to the bottom of the screen.

      Oops. Deerooreeroo whoop-whoop!

      (Well, without the sound on the iPhone. Since it doesn't do Flash.)

  • NSFW (Score:3, Informative)

    by DarthVain ( 724186 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:47AM (#32294928)

    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.

    • If "sound" is NSFW, you need a new job.

      • On one of my previous jobs my contract was terminated because I was watching FOX News while eating my lunchtime sandwich.

        Yeah I know - FOX. But I don't think watching MS-NBC would have made any difference - they were cutting contractors and costs. They also told me "You are eating too much food at the lunch buffet." I only weigh 140 pounds - I don't eat much. :-| - Anyway.... DON'T give your a-hole boss an excuse to do the same to you! Turn down the Pac-Man sound

      • "Sound" isn't NSFW, but video games are.

        I am pretty sure sound from video games are a dead giveaway to your boss that your playing video games.
        Since most people are not allowed to play video games at work...

        In which case you might need to start looking for a new job.

    • My work doesn't let us have speakers, you insensative clod!

    • Why would you have speakers on in an office environment anyway?

  • 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 s

    • Wow, they let you use flamethrowers?! That's a lot more fun than pulling the drives and tossing the rest in the dumpster.

  • Very cool. (Score:3, Informative)

    by M. Baranczak ( 726671 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:55AM (#32295032)

    It's not entirely done in JavaScript - they have an off-screen Flash applet that handles the sound.

    • 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.

      • by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples.gmail@com> on Friday May 21, 2010 @12:52PM (#32295878) Homepage Journal

        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:

        • Waveform files only; no decompression or synthesis on the client side. (XNA has the same problem.)
        • No single audio codec works in all browsers due to the various browsers' different patent policies. Some support only MP3 and/or AAC while others support only Vorbis.
        • No way to play the same sound on top of itself, such as two car engines using the same sample.
        • Some browsers don't even support playing two different sounds on top of each other.
        • No way to play any sound in released versions of Internet Explorer.

        I could be wrong; feel free to post links to web sites demonstrating how to overcome these deficiencies.

  • I can hear many of my staff playing as I write this.

    Ah, well!
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You can hear your staff playing video games while you post on Slashdot? But I thought 3DRealms folded?

  • 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...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      no one gives a fuck about people who are that stupid.

      Seriously, watch them abandon google

      oh wait, they won't.

      Google should do this more often.

    • I've never worked helpdesk so I guess I'm not familiar with the magnitude of stupidity that is possible, but REALLY? People don't know what pacman is? Pacman is a cultural icon, everyone knows what it is in a similar way to tetris. I'm finding it hard to believe that non-techs would both be uninterested in pacman, and not even know what it is.

    • by Wovel ( 964431 )

      Check out the Wikipedia page for links to the sources..:

      In 1982 the song reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart..
      There is a Pac-Man machine in the Smithsonian
      94% of American consumers recognize Pac-Man

      and of course, Pac-Man has been published for essentially every single platform that could possibly play it.

      On a personal note:
      My parents and my children recognize Pacman and recognized the sounds right away.

    • Be careful here, MrJones...

      I just found out that if you say anything negative about this that you'll get modded down pretty quickly.

      Evidently, most readers here on /. don't think about the potential problems that something like this can cause because this is fun (and will mod anyone down who disagrees with them).

      I personally have no problem with playing, but my rule is "first work, then play". You can then play harder with no guilt of having to stop playing to do the stuff you put off so you could play.

      Jus

  • by bradbury ( 33372 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (yrubdarB.treboR)> on Friday May 21, 2010 @12:03PM (#32295164) Homepage

    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?

    • Go away, Conserva-Troll

    • My coworkers and I agree that you get the daily Slashdot, "WTF? *facepalm* award," for that little gem of an irrelevant rant.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      I think that C is not green either, since it's really more efficient to code the game in assembly code that can be inlined in the web page.

      But assembly still consumes those excess cycles. You know what's really green? Not playing Pac-Man.

      Certainly, playing Pac-Man as it was originally---as an arcade game with a dedicated CRT monitor---is out of the question.

      Actually, I'm a little concerned with your comment up there, because it seems like there may have been some CPU cycles that were wasted in your comment.

    • Who shit in your Cheerios this morning?
    • by gorzek ( 647352 )

      Guess we'd better outlaw Flash and any video codecs that aren't built into the hardware, too, huh? And ban everything but assembly languages! Compilers, linkers, interpreters? Those are for pansies! Go green, code on the bare metal!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Newsflash: your laptop probably pulls about 20W no matter what you're doing on it (and most of that is lost to conversion costs) and even running at 100% CPU would probably only have a handful of watts more. However you lose about 30W constantly every time the battery needs to charge. So technically, if you were *THAT* worried about being green, you'd be unplugging your battery whenever you use your laptop and the battery is already fully charged. Desktop systems are more power-hungry too. Hell, your di

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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?

  • This is awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dorkmaster Flek ( 1013045 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @12:20PM (#32295380)
    The kicker is there's even a kill screen after stage 255. That's some serious dedication right there.
    • Re:This is awesome! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21, 2010 @01:31PM (#32296496)

      The Google PacMan kill screen [twitpic.com] for you

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      This is so subtle I doubt anyone else will catch it without looking for it. There's a bug in the original ROMs collision detection with the monsters. The way it works is this - each monster is polled one at a time instead of all at once. That's (part of) the reason you can be partially consumed by the monster instead of merely touching the outside (the collision detection is in the middle) - here's the bug - since it rotates through all the monsters, it's possible to (on very rare occasions) to pass through
  • by flahwho ( 1243110 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @12:57PM (#32295960)
    DAMN GOOGLE! now I have a quarter crammed into my LCD.
  • even cooler would be if they would save the top 10 highest scores.

  • by Call Me Black Cloud ( 616282 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @01:51PM (#32296814)
    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...
  • by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @01:55PM (#32296894)

    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?

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