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Play Now: Google’s Interactive Pac-Man 30th Anniversary Doogle!
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If you’ve been on Google‘s home page today, you probably noticed it’s sassy Pac-Man ‘Doogle’. The search-engine giant usually creates special Doogles — a custom Google logo — for various holidays and observances.

Since tomorrow, May 22, marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the classic arcade game Pac-Man, Google converted their logo into a Pac-Man theme. What you might not realize is that it’s actually an interactive Pac-Man game!

Yes, you can imagine how the rest of my day went after I stumbled upon this discovery.

Linger too long on Google’s home page today, and you’ll see the game — which has Google logo right in the center of the board — begins automatically. You can either use the arrows on the bottom right corner of your keyboard or use your mouse to navigate through the game (although, I find the latter opinion to work much slower). To begin the game, you can also either click on the logo or click on the “Insert Coin” button below the game.

Of course, when I happened upon this page today and saw “Insert Coin” I immediately had to click it. Upon hearing the game’s opening theme and then the ‘wocka wocka’ of the pellet feast, I felt tingly inside. I LOVE YOU PAC-MAN!

I was a little kid when Pac-Man first came on the scene, and you can ask my parents, I went from a normal little elementary school girl to a common street panhandler, begging for “Quarter? Quarter? Quarter?”

Just check out the video here below — this was a Saturday Night Live segment that aired at the time called “Alan: A Video Game Junkie.” I remember when was on, my parents were like, “Look, it’s you!” and they were right. Even then, I had to laugh because, yup, it was me.

I eventually I moved on to Ms. Pac-Man (still my all-time favorite), Donkey Kong, and many other classic arcade games, and while I was into video games before Pac-Man’s release (yes, I had Pong), Pac-Man was the game that really started my gaming addiction.

According to C-Net, the Pac-Man doogle is Google’s “first-ever truly interactive and playable home page logo.” The game, which has 255 levels, has “re-created (but authentic) sounds and graphics” and unlike other doogle’s that are removed from the Google home page after the day is over, this one will remain for 48 hours.

But 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.

Apparently, the makers of this Google version spent lots of time on this creation and took create pains to make it as authentic to the original game as possible, like including a two-player option. If you click the “Insert Coin” button twice, it will bring up a second player in the form of Ms. Pac-Man and then two people can play the same game simultaneously. (Per the Victoria Advocate, use the W-A-S-D keys to control the second player.)

For the next day or so, I think it’s best to keep my Google searching to a limit.

Video

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