Pac-Man’s Siren Call

The story of a most unusual bug on a most unusual day

Friday, May 21, 2010, might have been a usual Friday for most. For me, however, it could hardly have been more unusual.

This was the day I broke Twitter. The day I talked to my father for the last time. The day something I made was experienced by hundreds of millions of people. But this story is about none of those things. This story is about how I made some people feel like they were going crazy.

Back in 2010 I worked at Google, and I was roped in to research and code the Pac-Man doodle — the interactive 30th anniversary celebration of the classic arcade game we chose to put on Google’s homepage. I spent a few prior months writing all of the code from scratch (there was no emulation involved) and that Friday, at 9am Pacific Time, we were finally unveiling it to the world.

This was the first proper interactive doodle, and the first thing truly competing for attention with Google’s search box. So among the design decisions we needed to make was finding a good balance between promoting the doodle, and just allowing people to complete their search and move on with their lives.

After a lot of deliberation, we decided to do the following:

automatically start playing the doodle if visitors kept the homepage open for 10 seconds (of course, they could start playing earlier if they clicked on the doodle or the special Insert Coin button)

start the doodle with the sound on (otherwise many might not realize sound was even available and have less fun playing the game)

keep the Pac-Man doodle around for 48 hours instead of the usual 24 hours

Aggressive? Perhaps. But we had a freaking Pac-Man game on our homepage. We felt rather proud of it and we wanted people — unaccustomed yet to Google’s homepage being playable — to know about it and enjoy playing it.