Google's 2010 Pac-Man doodle caused phantom Firefox sounds, designer says

In 2010, Google marked the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by turning its homepage logo into a playable version of the game, and designer Marcin Wichary has now described how the project led to unexpected sound reports from some Firefox users. The playable doodle navigated a Pac-Man maze around the letters GOOGLE and could start automatically after a visitor stayed idle for ten seconds. Wichary says Google later patched the game after discovering that the CoolPreviews Firefox extension could invisibly open the homepage in the background.

Building the playable logo

Wichary, who has held senior design roles at Figma, Medium, and Google, says he got the job of building the playable logo. He says it was a "terrifying proposition" because the homepage was then a very important destination and his job title was only adjacent to "software engineer." He researched the game and recreated it in HTML and CSS, and Google wanted a full Pac-Man experience, including sound, because many of the game's sounds are iconic. He began work before Google sought permission from Pac-Man owner Namco, because the company was planning to wow them with a close-to-finished doodle. Namco eventually got onboard, he says.

Autoplay and the Firefox extension

Google decided the game should start automatically if visitors to google.com stayed idle for ten seconds. Wichary says he liked that idea and was not worried about distraction because the homepage was not a destination page you would ever linger on. Some people lingered on the home page without knowing they were there: Firefox users with an extension called CoolPreviews, which let users hover over a link to see a preview of a web page. The extension would quietly start when Firefox opened and immediately, in the background, invisibly and unbeknownst to the user, open a website. That website was Google's home page, which now featured an auto-playing version of Pac-Man that CoolPreviews users did not expect.

Patch and aftermath

Not long after the doodle went live, Google received praise but also reports about computers making strange noises because CoolPreviews was invisibly opening the noisy game. Wichary says he pushed a patch within hours, adding a mute button and a requirement to click something to make the game and its noises start. CoolPreviews could not make those clicks, so the phantom Pac-Man sounds went away. He says he does not believe Google ever heard of ordinary people being bothered by the autoplay, since few people stayed on the homepage for ten seconds doing nothing. He also says emergency live-patching what was then the internet's most valuable homepage was perhaps the scariest part of that day, but it went over his sleep-deprived head. Google changed Wichary's title after the incident; his post shows an image describing him as "User experience designer. The Michael Bay of doodles."

Sources: The Register