Last week, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of PacMan, Google put a version of the game on their main page. The game proved so popular that they’ve now made it permanently available. Here are 7 reasons that they shouldn’t have.
1. Age. Pacman is slow, old looking and not as much fun as it once was: This is typical of everything and everyone over thirty. Why not encourage contemporary game developers by putting a new game there?
2. 1980. By reviving Pacman, Google is taking us back to 1980. But there are far better years that Google could celebrate. Why look back to a year that gave us the Olympic boycott, the election of Robert Mugabe, the death of John Bonham and the interminable and tedious saga of who shot JR Ewing? Why not commemorate 2009? Computer games were better; clothes were better; hair was better; England won The Ashes. It’s a much better year.
3. Prominence. Why not use the widely viewed search engine to promote something good? Instead of putting Pacman there, why not celebrate the 65th anniversary of the end of WWII with an appeal for world peace or commemorate 1986 with an appeal for the Duchess of York to shut up and go away? Who wouldn’t prefer that?
4. Time. According to people that could be bothered to work it out, 4.82 million (Pac)man-hours (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) were spent playing Pacman last Friday. That can’t all have been me, there must have been several other people playing it too. Perhaps you’re one of them. That’s a lot of time spent playing something so obsolete.
5. Ubiquity. Once you’ve been playing Pacman for nine hours or so, your mind begins to unravel a bit and you start to see him all over the place. I’ve produced a pie chart to illustrate this phenomena. Seriously, he’s everywhere.
6. Music. Michael Winner dressed in a purple shell-suit scraping his fingernails down Simon Cowell’s blackboard would be less irritating than the relentlessly jaunty music from Pacman. That it has been seldom heard in the last few years should be a cause for general rejoicing. Offices can already be hellish enough places to work; imagine being able to hear someone at the next desk playing Pacman. Actually, try not to imagine it. Take deep breaths and think cleansing thoughts. Close your eyes and say “Ommmm”.
7. Rubbish. The single worst thing about the revival of Pacman is that I’m bloody rubbish at it. Useless. Cataclysmically useless. Useless to an extent that in years to come, my name will probably be used to redefine humanity’s very concept of uselessness. Nothing in my childhood prepared me for being chased by monsters – not even all of the Scooby Doo viewing – I was too busy playing Space Inavders. Now that’s a real game.
