As you may know, there is no great shortage of time-wasters on the Internet, but who’d’ve thunk that Google’s homepage would get in on the action? In what may well be the best Google Doodle yet, the good people of the Googleplex celebrate Pac-Man‘s 30th birthday with a playable Doodle. That’s right: You can play a fully fleshed-out version of Pac-Man right on Google’s homepage. Presumably, it’ll transfer to Google’s Doodle archive once the weekend is over. Pac-Man’s actual birthday is tomorrow.
If you’re up to the challenge, you can even make it 2-player and bring Ms. Pac-Man into the loop! Click the “insert coin” button again and you’ll be able to control her with W, A, S, and D on your keyboard. And according to Gizmodo, the Pac-Man doodle is playable up to the kill screen on level 256.
Just as impressively as the very existence of this thing, to the web-geeky among us, it appears there’s almost no Flash involved:
It’s nearly all JavaScript (except for the sound generator, which is Flash.) The walls are one big image, and each dot is an HTML div that appears and disappears when eaten. The 5 (or 6, if you go 2-player) actors are all PNG images.
If, however, you want to use Google without Pac-Man, you can do a no-frills Google search by going to http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout.
(Google.com; h/t Gizmodo)
