Play Pac-Man in Google Maps

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 1, 2015

In case you haven’t heard…  in what is probably the BEST Google April Fool’s Stunt of all time… you can go to Google Maps and play Pac-Man out in the center of your street map. You need a relatively dense selection of streets in your map for it to work, but the tool will generate a somewhat playable Pac-Man board from your map selection.

Okay, for the more detailed instructions (on a computer and web-browser), directly from Google:

 

1. Open Google Maps on your computer.
2. Search for a place you think PAC-MAN might be. Get clues now. Or, navigate to a place on the map where you want to start your game.
3. If you find a location, click the PAC-MAN pin on the map .
4. If no pin is visible, in the bottom left, click PAC-MAN.
   

Your map will change to a game board, and you can start playing. If you can’t see the PAC-MAN tile, try making your browser window bigger so that there is enough room to play.

How to control PAC-MAN

Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to change PAC-MAN’s direction. You can press two keys at once to move diagonally.

Play more or share your score

After you run out of your 5 lives, you can click Try again to keep playing or an icon under Share your score to tell others.

The controls aren’t perfect, as streets in the real world get funky angles and splits and so forth. Ditto for the gameplay. But really, who cares? If all else fails, click the “Get lucky” link if it fails to generate an adequate game board and see what you get (like I did, below). It’s just… cool.

I want this to be a permanent feature of Google Maps. Hopefully they’ll make it permanently available, but I imagine with licensing limitations this is not likely. But who knows? Enjoy it today… the way the Internet gets on April Fool’s Day, it may be the only value you can get out of being online today.

 

Filed Under: Free Games, Geek Life - Comments: Comments are off for this article



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