Designer reveals how Pac-Man doodle broke Firefox users

Marcin Wichary, a designer who worked at Figma, Medium, and Google, revealed how his Pac-Man clone caused issues for Firefox users. In 2010, Google changed its homepage logo to a playable version of Pac-Man to celebrate the game's 30th anniversary. Wichary was tasked with building the playable Pac-Man logo that navigated around the letters GOOGLE. Google wanted the Pac-Man doodle to include sound effects like the starting melody and death jingle. Namco eventually approved and got onboard with the project after seeing its progress.

Google decided to make the Pac-Man doodle start automatically if visitors stayed idle on the homepage for ten seconds. The automatic activation relied on users lingering on the homepage without knowing they were there. Firefox users with the CoolPreviews extension experienced unexpected noise because the extension opened the homepage in the background. The CoolPreviews extension would automatically and invisibly open Google's homepage when Firefox was launched. Reports emerged of computers making strange noises due to CoolPreviews triggering the autoplaying Pac-Man game.

Wichary pushed a patch within hours that added a mute button and required a click to start the game. The patch fixed the issue because the CoolPreviews extension could not perform the required clicks to start the game. Wichary noted that few normal people were actually bothered by the autoplay feature. He described emergency live-patching the internet's most valuable homepage as the scariest part of the day for him. Google changed Marcin Wichary's job title to 'User experience designer. The Michael Bay of doodles.' after the incident.