Happy 30th Birthday Pac-Man, Google Style

Hat’s off to Google for unveiling perhaps the greatest tribute today to the 30th anniversary of the iconic video game Pac-Man. Google revealed its first “doodle” or temporary logo change back in 1998, with the first animated logo appearing on Newton’s birthday earlier this year. At this rate of increasing complexity, the Google logo should be sentient by 2012.

For the birthdays of one of the most successful video games of all time, Google reveals perhaps its most complex logo of all time, a full featured playable version of the game for the next 48 hours:

Hit “Insert Coin” twice and Mrs. Pac-Man will show up too.

Pac-Man

Pac-Man was first released on May 22nd, 1980, thirty years ago today, by Namco in Japan. According to Guinness, Pac-Man is the most successful coin-operated video game of all time. It sold more than 100,000 units in 1980 and kids pumped more than $1 billion dollars in quarters into the arcade game in its first fifteen months. It was played more then 10 billion times in the first twenty years from its release.

End Game

Due to a programming glitch the game ends at level 256, although that’s not much of an issue because few in history have ever gotten a perfect score. Billy Mitchell played the first verified perfect game in 1999. In 2009 David Race became the sixth and currently last person known to achieve a perfect score.

Notice we said ‘verified perfect game’? That’s because in 1982 an 8 year old named Jeffrey Yee allegedly received a congratulatory letter from then President Ronald Reagan congratulating him for the record score of 6,131,940 points. There’s a problem though, that score would only be possible by passing level 256, the famous impassable split-screen bug shown at left.

Pizza & Puck-Man

Toru Iwatani was the primary developer of the game in 1979, and has related the apocryphal story that the main character was designed after looking at a pizza that was missing a slice. In reality the character is a rounding and simplification of the Japanese character for kuchi, or mouth. The original name, pronounced pakku-man, is a take off of the Japanese phrase paku-paku taberu where the words paku-paku describe the sound of a mouth eating.

The game was released under the name Puck-Man, but modified for the game’s North American release to Pac-Man as it was feared that arcade machines would be vandalized by modifying the ‘P’ to an ‘F’.

Those Ghosts

“Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include Pac-Man’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980′s masterpiece,”
- Marcin Wichary, Usability, Google

Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde are the four ghost monsters, the antagonists of the game. Each has its own personality derived from movement patterns, as derivable from both past efforts to reverse engineer the game as well as the Japanese translations of their original names:

Name:	Color:	Translation:
Blinky	Red	Chaser
Pinky	Pink	Ambusher
Inky	Cyan	Fickle
Clyde	Orange	Stupid

Finally

You can go play Pac-Man a few blocks from Praetorian’s main office down at the Chinatown Fair Video Arcade on Mott Street.

With that we leave you with the 80′s tribute song Pac-Man Fever by Buckner and Garcia in honor of the day. Enjoy.

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Filed Under: Funny

Tags: google, video games