For Google’s 2010 Pac-Man anniversary doodle, Marcin Wichary was asked to build a playable game on the company’s homepage. He recreated the arcade classic in HTML and CSS, added sound through Flash, shaped the maze to resemble Google’s logo, and included a hidden Ms. Pac-Man mode. The team wanted the doodle to feel lively, so it was set to start automatically after ten seconds without activity. At the time, they assumed visitors would rarely leave the homepage untouched for that long, and the possibility of sound playing unexpectedly did not seem especially concerning.
The surprise came from Firefox users with the CoolPreviews extension. When Firefox launched, the extension quietly opened Google’s homepage in the background; ten seconds later, the game began blaring while users could not see where the sound came from. Reports described a frightening noise from an apparently empty computer, and advice to close the Pac-Man tab was useless to people unaware it was open. Wichary patched the doodle within hours, adding a mute control and requiring a click, keystroke, or other user action before sound could play. The episode illustrates how an interaction that seems harmless in its intended setting can become alarming when another piece of software changes the context. It also recalls the pressure of deploying personal code on Google’s homepage and the frantic work of fixing a live problem there.
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