April Fools’ Easter egg: Play Pac-Man on your city’s streets with Google Maps

31 Mar 2015

Google certainly know how to do their browser Easter eggs after they quietly released an option on Google Maps to turn any city’s streets into a giant game of the arcade classic, Pac-Man.

To activate the Easter egg, all the user has to do is look to the bottom left-hand corner of the screen where the option to select map or Earth view is, but which now has the addition of a Pac-Man option.

With the click of a button, you can watch Dublin’s streets, or any city’s street for that matter, turn into a giant game that’s easily one of the most iconic gaming brands of all time.

Given the tricky and convoluted nature of many European city streets, the game engine creates a few dead-ends that will probably kill poor Pac-Man a little more often than he would like and is probably that more suited to the US’s rigid vertical criss-cross of straight city roads, such as New York.

This isn’t the first time that Google has gone to rather extreme lengths to celebrate April Fools’ Day through Google Maps with their effort of turning the world into a giant Pokémon game in 2014 while in 2013, the world became a treasure hunt map.

So log on while you can and see how you can navigate your city’s streets as the yellow pixel-eating legend.

Pac-Man-Dublin

Pac-Man costume image via Loozrboy/Flickr

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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