Google is known for their playful April Fool’s Day pranks and hoaxes. Their first, MentalPlex, was an actual hoax. In 2000, when search engines were still in their formative stages, they tricked people into thinking about what they wanted to search for, and then delivered humorous error messages, like “Error 001: Weak or no signal detected. Upgrade transmitter and retry,” or “Error 8P: Unclear on whether your search is about money or monkeys. Please try again.”
The most recent April Fool’s gag isn’t a hoax or prank but more of an Easter Egg (five days early). Today, they announced that you can play Pac-Man in Google Maps, by simply clicking the little Pac-Man icon on the bottom-left of the screen.
Pac-Man hits the streets of Lower Manhattan — just outside Architizer’s office, in fact
It takes you to your location, with the roads transformed into a video-game screen. If you have ever wanted to much dots as you walked down the road you live on, you are in luck. Or, if your area doesn’t make for a god Pac-Man level, you can select the old Google stand-by, “I’m Feeling Lucky,” and it will take you to another location.
The levels somehow make sense in many of the pre-determined locations. Does turning your city into a Pac-Man game make you rethink how you navigate it? What would the Situationists think of this techno-derive? Could you plot a new course to work? When I was a small boy, I would imagine my mom firing “Ricochet Bombs” out of the front of her 1997 Dodge Caravan, since I played too much Twisted Metal 2 on Playstation. Maybe this can be that for you!