· javascript
Chap who coded Google’s Pac-Man clone reveals how the game freaked out Firefox
A designer named Marcin Wichary has revealed the story of how he freaked out a decent slab of the world’s Firefox-using population with Pac-Man.
Wichary has held senior design roles at Figma, Medium, and Google. As he wrote here, in 2010 Google decided to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by changing its logo at Google.com to a playable version of the game. The Google of 2010 could still mention its motto of the time, “Don’t be evil,” without making anyone who heard it guffaw incredulously.
The company’s frequent changes to the logo on its homepage – called Google Doodles, and which persist to this day – were still a notable part of net culture. Wichary got the job of building the playable logo, and tweaking Pac-Man to replace its usual maze with a course that instead navigated around the letters GOOGLE. “It was, frankly, a terrifying proposition,” Wichary wrote. “The homepage was then a very important destination, and my job title was only adjacent to ‘software engineer.’
