Google Maps brings Pac-Man back to play on city streets

 

Imagine if you could turn any city in the world into a game of Pac-Man. Oxford Street, London. Shibuya crossing, Tokyo. Champs-Elysées, Paris. The street where you live. All stripped back to a basic black maze that screams 1980s more loudly than any rah-rah skirt. You’d probably never work again.

 

Well, employers beware. Thanks to Google Maps, you can now populate any metropolis on the planet with four of the cutest ghosts in gaming history, the ever insatiable Pac-Man, and a whole load of dots. Forget the pleasure of sitting at home, zooming in on Google Maps’ satellite view of your street, and shouting, ‘LOOK! THERE I AM!’ to your computer. This is proper grown-up fun.

 

 

 

Time to take the 21st-century Pac-Man out for a test drive. First decision: where to go? After serious deliberation, I stick my own street into the search facility. Turns out I live in the world’s most boring Pac-Man postcode. Basically, a Kafka-esque square that Pac-Man wanders round and round, halfheartedly eating dots and waiting for gentrification to arrive. The only compensation? I make it to level three without so much as a swear word, and tot up more than 6,000 points.

Then on to somewhere more happening – Meguro, the Tokyo ward where Pac-Man’s Japanese designer, Toru Iwatani, grew up. Appropriately, this tightly packed network of streets makes the world’s best Pac-Man maze. I zip around, wolfing down dots and pieces of fruit, dodging ghosts, and generally feeling as at home as a character in a Kurosawa film – if she looked like a pizza with a slice cut out. I never get past level one but, like the original, it’s all good clean fun, with a city break thrown in for free.

Basically, the fun never ends. The most satisfying part of this link-up between two of the most simple yet addictive pieces of tech in modern history is what it does to the way you imagine cities. Or rather, reimagine them as Pac-Man mazes. This is at least as much fun as the actual gameplay. London’s Soho! New York’s grid system! Edinburgh’s New Town! Just think of the Pac-Man possibilities embedded in those rows of Georgian streets and crescents. Where next, Google Maps … Frogger?