You probably saw when Google had Pac-Man on their homepage in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the game. Okay, so you saw it; did you play it too? I thankfully did not get too invested in the game and probably played for about 10 seconds before my boss rounded the corner, but some people played for hours. Do you know how much time was “wasted” due to this game last week?
Five million hours– that’s right, five million. This, of course, is an estimate from companies that use a time-tracking software. This software, used at companies such as Rescue Time (a software firm), observes where workers go online and for how long. Apparently, the average Google search is 11 seconds long and most people conduct about 22 searches a day. However, when Google put Pac-Man up, that average length went to 36 seconds! Doing some extrapolating and assuming that there are about 500+ million users who use Google on a daily basis, then that is about 5 million hours of “Google’ing”! Putting that into more of a perspective for you, 5 million hours is about 550 years! Translating this into a money value, this 5 million hours of work equates to $100 million if you use a $20/hour salary!
Marcin Wichary and Ryan Germick are the Googlers who are responsible for this Pac-Man Doodle. It is the first interactive Doodle ever created by Google, and it probably won’t be the last. It was also pretty close to the original version of Pac-Man; this made it even better! To play you had to click the “Insert Coin” button that is usually the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. You then controlled Pac-Man by using the arrow keys. You could even swipe using your iPhone or Android! To make things even better, the Doodle makers inserted some fun things in the game. One was that you could tap the “insert Coin” button a few times and then Ms. Pac-Man would show up for some two-player fun. Also, if you managed to get to level 256, you would be greeted by the infamous killscreen. Fun huh?
To play the Doodle Pac-Man, click here!
