Pac-Man 30th anniversary marked by Google Doodle

Google has transformed the home page of its search engine in to a game of Pac-Man. The usual Google logo has been replaced by a playable version of the popular 1980s video game, in which small yellow Pac-Men must travel around a maze, gobbling up dots while trying to avoid the ghosts. Shapes within the maze spell out "Google".

Web users can still perform a search through the Google home page, but those who want to play the game have to click on the "Insert coin" button. Clicking that button twice allows you to play a two-player game, with one player taking the role of Miss Pac-Man, and controlling her progress using the W, A, S and D characters on the keyboard.

Google said it had commissioned the doodle, its first ever interactive illustration, to mark the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man's release. Google said the launch of Pac-Man marked "a significant moment in popular culture", and said that web users had 48 hours to "re-live the nostalgia" of the 1980s by playing the game on the Google site.

"To pay the homage that Pac-Man deserves as a ground-breaking innovation in the gaming world, Google equipped the doodle with many unique characteristics from the original Pac-Man game," said a Google spokesman. "From preserving the distinct personalities of the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, to re-creating programming bugs from the original game, like a 'kill screen' on level 256, Marcin Wichary, a senior user experience designer at Google, and our resident Google doodler, Ryan Germick, remained as faithful to the spirit of Pac-Man as possible."

Google has a long history of altering its home page doodle to mark significant anniversaries and events. A recent series of mysterious doodles, designed to celebrate the birthday of HG Wells, sparked a wave of conspiracy theories online. The birth of Samuel Morse was marked by the Google logo appearing as a series of dots and dashes.