The interactive doodle faithfully recreated the original arcade title while repurposing standard homepage buttons, such as turning the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option into an "Insert Coin" prompt. It also quietly relied on Flash to provide game audio and featured an authorized Ms. Pac-Man easter egg. Problems emerged when users began reporting unexpected sounds emitting from their computers without their knowledge. An investigation revealed that the Firefox extension CoolPreviews was secretly pre-loading the homepage and launching the timed audio automatically.
Key points
A background link-previewing browser extension caused the automated game audio to play wi…: A background link-previewing browser extension caused the automated game audio to play without users intentionally opening the page.
The doodle remained faithful to original arcade elements while integrating hidden feature…: The doodle remained faithful to original arcade elements while integrating hidden features such as an authorized Ms. Pac-Man easter egg.
Automated web audio features can lead to unintended consequences when interacting with th…: Automated web audio features can lead to unintended consequences when interacting with third-party browser add-ons like CoolPreviews.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Pac-Man’s siren call
It’s the last day of Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a story of how my bug scared others.
In 2010, Google’s homepage celebrated various occasions with reimaginings of its own logo called doodles, but we wanted to do something extra special for Pac-Man’s upcoming 30th anniversary – and through a set of circumstances that began with me randomly sitting in the cubicle right next to the doodle team, I was asked to write the code.
It was, frankly, a terrifying proposition. The homepage was then a very important destination, and my job title was only adjacent to “software engineer.” But I started researching the game and recreating it all in HTML and CSS, not dissimilarly to the iPod Apple just put on their pages to celebrate a different anniversary.
(The research was tricky because we didn’t want to reach out to Namco for help too soon, instead planning to wow them with a close-to-finished doodle. Luckily, some nerds on the internet researched Pac-Man intensely, so I could stand…
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