Google and the Ghosts of Pacmanâs Past
Itâs one of the webâs great ironies. Although Google owns arguably the webâs most iconic page â the Google front page â theyâve spent a great deal of time and effort giving us ways to completely bypass it. I know most of my searches are made directly from the Chrome address bar and every day more searches originate from any number of search bars, browser extensions, phone apps, plugins and toolbars.
This makes one thing abundantly clear: Itâs the results page that pays the bills at Google.
However, looking back over more than 10 years of tribute doodles, I think Googleâs heart and soul still lives in itâs front page. Over that time weâve seen hat-tips to everything from morse code to Burning Man to Lego and yesterday, in case you missed it, the 25th 30th anniversary of Pacman.
Only this time, they may well have outdone themselves. Not content with a simple visual tribute, this time the Googlers coded their logo into the maze of a working Pacman game. Click the âInsert Coinâ button and suddenly youâre playing a slick, authentic take on the classic 80âs chomper.
This was an impressive effort for lots of reasons.
Firstly, theyâve managed to construct the whole shooting match from garden variety HTML divs, image sprites and JavaScript. Impressively they havenât even resorted to any new-fangled Canvas or SVG, let alone Flash or other 3rd party tech.
Secondly, to my knowledge, this is the first time Google has incorporated sound into a tribute, with a glorious soundscape of âgloop-gloopsâ, âpeepsâ and wailing sirens serenading our little yellow guy on his adventures. However, although this was certainly a technical triumph, it would be fair to say it hasnât been entirely without user experience problems.
Not long after launch, help forums at Google, Mozilla and Yahoo started getting increasingly alarmed complaints of inexplicable sirens emanating from their computer.
While some users were simply unknowingly launching the sounds when they launched their browser, others had a more serious underlying problem. Apparently a bug in the popular Cool Previews Firefox extension allowed the Pacman soundscape to persist even after they had left the Google page.
Now, I love Pacman but that could get old fast.
Cooliris patched the bug quickly but these things take a while to make their way out into the wild. You could argue this wasnât Googleâs fault, but it might give you pause for thought when experimenting with sound on the web.
Anyway, if you did miss Pacmanâs visit to the Google front page, fear not. Happily heâs found a permanent home at http://www.google.com/pacman.
Hmmm.. Is that the sound of falling productivity I can hear?