That means you have to eat all four ghosts off each power pellet each time. Each time you eat a power pellet, the four ghosts turn dark blue and become vulnerable, with the first being worth 200 points, the next 400, the next 800, and the last 1600. Eating each ghost is far and away the most difficult aspect of maximizing your points, at least on the early boards. Eating the dots and power pellets is a requisite for advancing each board, and so they’re taken for granted. I’ve decided to take a moment to document my journey here, for the entertainment of readers of this site, for future aspiring perfect score players looking for assistance, and perhaps even to inspire others to begin this quest for themselves.Īs a quick brush-up on the basics of scoring, there are four sources of points in Pac-Man: Regular dots, power pellets (also called “energizers”), eaten ghosts, and fruit. But I had some time off in October, and a golden opportunity to take my first steps toward this goal. I also, by quirk of fate, ended up with ownership of a website domain called, and it only seemed appropriate that the owner of such a domain actually be a perfect score player.Īs you might have surmised by the “Part 1” in the title, I have not yet finished ascending that metaphorical mountain. While I am by no means any sort of gaming god, I came to believe I could execute each of a perfect score’s component parts in isolation, and with practice, could likely do so in sequence. While some have self-servingly chosen to portray a perfect score on original Pac-Man as an impossible “holy grail”, attainable by only a select few separated from the masses by some manner of divine provenance, my research helped dispel the illusion that the maximum score was beyond my grasp. Reading about cornering mechanics and ghost speeds and forward motion patterns and safe spots, I found myself absorbing many of the lessons needed for top play. Whatever the cause, I found myself in a similar situation a while back, having spent the previous year before that mired in research on Pac-Man strategies and early competition on the game. This could be the result of an innate human gravitation toward conflict and controversy, or perhaps more optimistically, the coverage of an important community matter results in people incidentally learning enough about the game in question to find themselves both interested in playing it and up to speed on the basics for competition. You saw it with Minecraft, and Trackmania – and that’s not even counting the surge of fresh Atari 2600 players in 2017 vying for the newly-discovered-to-be-vacant record on Dragster.
While the wasted time and heightened distrust are a net negative for the community, sometimes the added attention does result in an influx of honest competitors taking up the game in the immediate aftermath of the scandal. You know, without actually needing any quarters.There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed, which happens when a video gamer gets busted for cheating (or at least whenever there’s a cheating controversy). And we can only hope you find using Google at least a quarter as enjoyable as eating dots and chasing ghosts. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them. They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. PAC-MAN seems like a natural fit for the Google homepage. 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. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece.
To play the game, go to during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds.
Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. 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. One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets and-of course-free games! When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician.
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