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SOFTWARE INDUSTRY NEWS |
Google celebrates Pacman's 30th Anniversary |
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Google is hosting Pacman, one of the most successful video games ever, on its home page in celebration of the game's 30-year anniversary.  Pacman is an arcade game created by Tōru Iwatani and developed by Namco, whose popularity transcended “geopolitical barriers of that time” as Google senior UX designer and developer Marcin Wichary put it. “During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun,” he said on the Google Blog.To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pacman, Google put game in place of its logo on its search page, allowing the generation that grew up to Pacman to relive their childhood, while simultaneously introducing contemproary kids to the pleasures of 8-bit gaming. Importantly, the game is Google's first-ever playable Google doodle, which the Internet company is keeping in place at google.com for 48 hours. Pacman is amongst the longest running game franchises ever, with versions still available for even the new iPhone and iPad generation.  Google doodler Ryan Germick and Wichary developed the doodle together, ensuring that they did not miss PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds. They also brought back the ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreated original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece.' We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys),” Wichary said on the blog.Numerous organizations were reported to have blocked Google's home page from their work places in order to contain productivity outages with widespread gaming being the flavor of the day on Friday.
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