On the 21st of May, Google ran a version of the famous Pac-Man game on its homepage to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the original launch of the game in Japan.

It has turned out to be so popular that google has given it a permanent home at google/pacman. According to stats released for that one day, 5 million hours of work was lost. That is a pretty amazing figure but I have to say I have been messing with it since I found it.

If I am honest if I didn’t know it was playable already I probably wouldn’t have guessed. Google regularly mess around with their title font so I might have just looked passed it.The insert coin button is a nice touch. Very retro! It replaces the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button which I don’t think I have ever used. I would love that job of figuring out cool new ways to present the Google on the search page.

One final stat going back to the 5m hours lost that day. If the average person is paid €15 per hour, that equates to €75 million euro in wages wasted by Google!