Google celebrates 30 years of Pac-Man

A little more than 30 years ago, Toru Iwatani helped himself to a slice of pizza and looked down at the rest of the
pie. What he saw inspired one of the world’s most recognized video
games: Pac-Man, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980.

On Friday, Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde were back, this time as guest stars on the Google search engine’s home page, trolling along the company’s iconic logo.

Google Inc. has twiddled with its logo hundreds of times — about 700, in fact. The first time was in 1999, when company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin put a wooden stick man behind the logo as a tongue-in-cheek way of
saying they’d be out of the office attending the Burning Man festival.

One of the favorites appeared this April Fools’ Day, when Google changed the logo to read “Topeka.” That was a nod to the Kansas city’s unofficially changing its own name to Google as part of its bid to become a hub for the company’s experimental super-fast broadband network.

Google’s homage
to Pac-Man, however, was its first playable logo. In place of the usual
“I’m Feeling Lucky” button below the search field, there was a button
that said “Insert Coin.”

Players didn’t have to fork over any quarters, but many seemed to be playing the game on their bosses’ dime — Google said it saw a surge in users spending more time on the search page.

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