Pac-Man’s siren call – Unsung

Google's 2010 Pac-Man 30th anniversary homepage doodle, coded by an engineer adjacent to the doodle team, became a landmark interactive logo that recreated the arcade classic in pure HTML and CSS, with a Ms. Pac-Man two-player easter egg and an "Insert Coin" reimagining of the I'm Feeling Lucky button. The team secured Namco's blessing late in development, deliberately avoiding early outreach to wow the company with a near-finished build. Leadership then approved an autoplay feature that launched the game with sound after 10 seconds of homepage inactivity, requiring Flash-based audio support. The autoplay-with-sound decision backfired on launch day, as the unexpected siren call of Pac-Man audio blared from users' browsers. The episode matters as an early case study in how experimental homepage features at web-scale companies can produce unintended user-experience consequences. Watch for whether Google continues balancing playful doodle experimentation against homepage disruption as its products evolve.