World's Biggest PAC-MAN
- Brand
- PAC-MAN
- Year
- 2011
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Soap Creative Australia
Objective
Namco Bandai marked PAC-MAN's 30th anniversary and wanted the brand back in the web conversation; Microsoft used the project to showcase HTML5 and hardware-accelerated rendering in the newly launched Internet Explorer 9, unveiling it at the Microsoft MIX11 conference. Rather than a one-off video, the goal was a game the fan community would keep building together, generating fresh content for months.
Solution
The site opens on a sprawling map made of thousands of maze thumbnails other players have drawn, with coordinates and live global stats running down the side. Clicking any tile drops the player into a standard PAC-MAN maze, no install or sign-in required; clear the dots and dash out through the exit, and you fall straight into a neighbor's maze rather than restarting. Anyone who logs in with Facebook can claim an open tile next to the existing map and spend an hour sketching a new maze with a pencil-and-eraser tool, adding it permanently to the shared grid. The mazes other players leave behind range from Mario and Sonic tributes to burgers and marriage proposals, so every session runs through a patchwork of other people's ideas rather than one fixed level.
- 1
The player opens worldsbiggestpacman.com to a scrollable map of thousands of coordinate-tagged mazes drawn by other players, each thumbnail marked as already played, self-created, pending moderation, or open to claim. A side panel shows global stats for the whole game world, including total dots eaten, mazes created, and top countries.
- 2
Clicking any thumbnail starts a game in that maze immediately; no account is needed to play, only to build.
- 3
Within a maze, the player moves PAC-MAN with the arrow keys, eats every dot, and avoids four ghosts — Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Eating a power pellet (a maze may contain anywhere from zero to ten) briefly lets the player hunt the ghosts instead.
- 4
The player has three lives and earns an extra one every 10,000 points; the run ends once all lives are lost.
- 5
Instead of the arcade's side tunnels, each maze has doors: exiting through one drops the player into a neighboring maze made by a different person, where the ghosts reset.
- 6
A maze need not be finished in one go — the player can leave it uneaten, wander elsewhere in the world, and come back later, with per-cell progress preserved.
- 7
To contribute a maze, the player clicks "Create a Maze," logs in via Facebook Connect, and picks an open cell next to existing mazes so the new one attaches to the shared world rather than standing alone.
- 8
A one-hour timer bounds the editing session, during which the player draws on a 25×25 grid using pencil and eraser tools to place walls, dots, and empty space.
- 9
Submitted mazes are held as pending and screened for inappropriate content before release; once approved, strangers play them, and many creators use the grid to draw pictures or text rather than a real maze.
- 10
A separate stats page tracks the game's overall scale: total mazes created, dots eaten, ghosts defeated, and countries represented.
