

Play PacMan at google.com Now. - mapleoin
http://google.com?

======
mike-cardwell
Wonder how many global man hours are going to be wasted by people playing this
game today ;)

~~~
MikeCapone
I wonder if it'll show on the stock market...

~~~
javanix
It might help ... maybe happy people can make a bit of a rally.

~~~
mbrubeck
What Wall Street needs is a <http://linerider.com/> style game on the graphs
at <http://finance.google.com/>.

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Femur
Boy, did that surprise the heck out of me. I never worry about keeping my
speakers turned up when going to google.com

~~~
mbrubeck
Apparently this is overwhelming the Firefox support forums and chat lines:

<https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/678373>

~~~
jacquesm
Bad move by google, really. Start on a button click is one thing but auto-
starting something that makes a bunch of noise on a page that has always been
totally silent is really dumb.

~~~
studer
Google doesn't autostart anything, it's a FireFox extension (Cool Previews)
that loads the page in the background that causes the trouble. I suggest
reading up on the real story before you start labeling things as "bad moves"
and "really dumb".

~~~
follower
Actually, the sound does autostart when you load the page. But the playing
sound in the background issue is related to the extension.

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RodgerTheGreat
If anybody's curious about the source, here's a reformatted version:

<http://pastebin.com/enyeHeKg>

~~~
cmelbye
Only Google would write 3,162 lines of source code for something that would be
on their site for 24 hours.

EDIT: You wouldn't happen to be Rodger from the nonlogic community, would you?

~~~
studer
You wouldn't be prepared to write 3,162 lines of code for something with a
guaranteed audience of hundreds of millions of people? What does it take for
you to get out of bed? Billions of viewers?

~~~
joubert
How many people played it?

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mawhidby
On an unrelated note, as of 3:33PM EST, this story has 262 points over 4
hours, and is ranked lower than "Facebook caught sharing secret data with
advertisers", which has 210 points over 16 hours (this story ranked 27, the
facebook story 23). Is there a reason for this? Shouldn't this be near the top
of HN?

~~~
lhorie
FWIW, I had posted this earlier

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367899>

Edit: actually it seems this post one is older. Hadn't seen it :(

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marcusbooster
Insert a second coin for Ms. Pac-Man multi-player.

~~~
mambodog
I've no friends, so I'm just playing two-handed. Try it for an extra
challenge..

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pilif
This even works on the abomination that is IE6.

That's what they get from not using Canvas or any other technology newer than
10 years old. The game is built of 8x8 pixel DIVs.

~~~
neovive
Maybe it was originally written for the 20th anniversary.

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rpbertp13
Try removing ghosts with Firebug and play blind pac man!

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dunham
Aside from no sound, it works on the iPad. They seem to be handling touch
events (swipes) for movement.

~~~
zsouthboy
Sound is played using Flash, so that's why it doesn't work.

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ccc3
Does this imply that nobody uses the "I'm feeling lucky" button?

~~~
moskie
I find it very useful to use as a search destination for the address bar.

For example, in Chrome, add this as one of the Search Engines in the options
dialog:
[http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky](http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky)

I've associated that with the keyword "gg"

Now, when I go to the address bar and type a query whose first Google result I
am confident will be the destination I want, I've got a great way to get
there.

Example:

"gg imdb Forest Gump"

Will get me to IMDB's Forest Gump page. So you can pretty much imagine the
power here, especially for reference sites. Type the site name and the query,
and you'll end up where you want to be.

~~~
bkudria
You should use <http://yubnub.com>, which will let you just type "imdb Forest
Gump", among many, many, many other things.

~~~
crystalis
Why? His solution automatically works for anything, and your site doesn't even
appear to be up at the time of writing.

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jazzychad
I wonder how much of the code was inspired by Neven Mrgan's PieGuy iphone
webapp game, also written in html/js.

<http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy>

<http://mrgan.com/pieguy/> <\-- go here on your iphone

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timf
Would be awesome to see a high score list.

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yanowitz
Best. Logo. Ever.

~~~
ashishbharthi
Time has come for interactive Google Logos. This will be so much fun.

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soundlab
This is great, except for that some element of Google (address bar search?) is
running in the background of my firefox browser and the siren audio is on a
continuous loop even after leaving Google. No add-on or plug-in I remove
helps.

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harry
I hope I'm not the only one offended that the ghosts don't act like their
pacman counterparts. Red is such a puss in google land!

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mcav
<incorrect> And here I thought that Google had implemented PacMan in HTML5 on
their logo, given their presentation at Google I/O. </incorrect>

EDIT: I didn't see that you had to click "Insert Coin" to start.

~~~
chaosmachine
It's implemented with javascript and html, but they're using Flash for sound.

~~~
bd
Unfortunately Flash is currently pretty much unavoidable if you want sound
effects in JS games.

I experimented with <audio> tag in HTML5 game few days ago: it's fine for
media player type applications (where you play longer sounds with looser
coupling to user actions), but it's not there yet for games (implementation-
wise, API is ok).

If you need to play a lot of tiny sounds in rapid response to player actions,
you are going to get random weird behaviors and cross-browser inconsistencies:
noticeable lags, cracking noises, cuts and repetitions.

~~~
phoboslab
This seems to be heavily depended on the file types you use. I have some
experiments with many different, short, sound files running with <audio> just
fine - in Chrome, FF and Opera at least.

Ogg Vorbis and (of course WAV) works quite nice, MP3 doesn't. For Safari,
maybe AAC would be the right choice. Still, as you said, the <audio>
implementation is quite buggy at times. But I have no doubt it will get
better!

~~~
bd
Yes, a good point. I confirm, also in my experience problems are very
dependent on particular sound files. Some work perfectly fine, some make
troubles.

And it's not just encoding, it seems to be dependent also on what's inside the
sound file like a particular waveform or length.

For me the worst were a sequences of very short sounds (fractions of second)
played in a direct response to rapid successive keypresses (keydown-keydown-
keydown should make pew-pew-pew). No matter what I did, there was always at
least one browser with some showstopping bug.

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kacy
It works on the iPhone too. Type in the address in Safari, then click Classic
mode at the bottom of the screen. ^_^

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indrax
This is going to spike their time-on-front-page statistics.

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enterneo
I love pacman, but still the game should NOT start automatically (the sound is
really irritating).

~~~
follower
If you want to remove the sound use this bookmarklet which deletes the iframe
used to load the Flash file:

javascript:(function(){var
rancidbacon={};try{rancidbacon.com=document.getElementsByName("pm-
sound")[0];rancidbacon.com.parentElement.removeChild(rancidbacon.com);}catch(_){}})()

More details here: <http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/google-pacman/>

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pclark
at least it isn't flash.

how senior did the approval have to be to get this allowed, do you think?

~~~
jacquesm
It's partially flash.

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jeiting
I would like to see how many millions google makes by disabling the I'm
Feeling Lucky button today.

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Mark_B
Anybody know how to save the page off for posterity? A simple "Save Page As"
didn't seem to work.

~~~
snprbob86
It will probably show up in the archive at:

<http://www.google.com/logos/index.html>

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oilfieldtrash
What's the matter with you guys? THe PacMan thing was great. What a fun
surprise. I've been to Google now 10 times in the past two days-- and I
usually only use their serach engine once or twice a day. Stopped me from
going to dogpile......

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operandx
I've uploaded a copy of the Google PAC-MAN Doodle here:

<http://operandx.com/GooglePacman/Play.html>

Enjoy!

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neovive
Someone needs to publish a revised PacMan strategy guide for getting around
all those extra obstacles. Should you get pellot inside the G at the start or
end?

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WillyF
I'd love to see the analytics on their home page for today.

~~~
sjs382
Average time on site: 3 hours.

(no, not really)

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minalecs
I think we are all missing the point, that its <b> Pac-Man's 30th anniversary
</b>. But yes the playable logo, just adds to the awesomeness

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castis
I dont know why, but I'm really happy this exists.

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xephris
Works on Android as well! But not BlackBerry.

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ukdm
I found a bug... collected a pill as a previous one's time allotment was
ending and it didn't register in the game.

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naqeeb
Too bad they didn't modify Pacman so that the ghosts have an apple logo and
the pellets are Android phones.

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someone_here
Well there goes my day.

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dryicerx
Just imagine the productivity drop around the world...

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heresy
I woke up to my girlfriend playing this.

Awesome :)

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rawat81
May be Google will dish out there own anti spyware & antivirus for chrome
next.

I liked the plain old google page .. simple

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scorpion032
9030.

My score.

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l4u
it lowers my productivity :( but it's fun

------
dayjah
love this!

