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Google Maps makes the world a playable game of Pac-Man

Google has started the April Fools Day fun a bit early with a new Pac-Man easter egg allowing users to play the classic arcade game on the streets of Google Maps. Here’s how to do it:

All you have to do is open up Google Maps and look for the Pac-Man icon in the corner to activate the game (as shown below):

Google uses the streets in whatever location you’ve selected in Maps for the game map, which means you might want to look for a big city like New York to get an interesting game map. 

With this update, we’ve added imagery of dangerous virtual beings, starting with Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde. When navigating fruit-filled streets, determine at a glance which turns to pass to evade ghosts and get where you’re going safely. When you’re feeling a bit peckish, you can simply gobble up a few pac-dots or a cherry and keep on nommin’. PAC-Maps makes navigating around select locations as simple as left, right, up or down.

The Pac-Man game is accessible through Google Maps on the web, Android, and iOS. Google’s Ingress has even joined in:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K90H9fFvpIk]

Someone at Google is clearly a Pac-Man fan, as the company has previously done other easter eggs for the game including a playable Doodle on its homepage to celebrate the title’s 30th anniversary. Last year, Google offered a Pokemon mini-game in Google Maps. 

[tweet https://twitter.com/googlemaps/status/582918332791320576]

(Image via Kotaku)

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Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s weekly Logic Pros series and makes music as one half of Toronto-based Makamachine.