

(Have you seen all of the "Easter eggs" littered across Google's many websites?) Nonetheless, Pac-Man got reader Lea Kim thinking: "Hmm. Please do stuff like this again, just incorporate a mute button :)"ĭon't expect to see many future Google Doodles quite like this one. I can't do anything else with sound because the game sound rides overtop of everything on every site that I go to. "It just sucks that the sound from the game stays on even when you leave the Google page. Monitor reader Lisa enjoys the creativity of incorporating Pac-Man into Google's logo, just not the noise. "Grrr - my 84 year old husband screwed up his computer trying to get rid of this mess," writes Yamahamama4. "The noise in the background follows me through every website! I don't wanna play it anymore!!"

(And have you tried playing two-player?) But there is another sizable bloc of readers that wish Pac-Man would hurry off-screen and never come back. A decent percentage of commenters share similar anecdotes. "Office productivity down by 60%, bandwidth usage down by 80%, only page visited, Thuto is probably fudging those numbers a little, but his point is clear. "Reporting from South Africa," writes Monitor reader Thuto.

Reading through the 50-plus comments left below our Friday story, seems we were right. Here at the Monitor, we joked that this clever birthday present to a true arcade classic would result in hundreds of thousands of lost man-hours as office productivity ground to a halt. Google had a big surprise yesterday: A fully playable Pac-Man 30th anniversary game built into its homepage. But you can keep playing the game for free. Update: Pac-Man has left Google's homepage.
