Port Man? Play ‘Pac Man’ through the streets of Portland

Port Man

Tip of the cap to my colleague, Julia Bayly, who passed along the news that Google Maps is now letting you convert your city streets — including those in our beloved Portland — into “Pac Man” game boards.

As you can see from the default screen shot of Portland after Google Pac-Manned it, the iconic yellow video game chomper starts off around the corner of Oxford and Pearl streets. His ghost enemies — Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde — queue up near the corner of Kennebec and Chestnut streets.

pac instructionsYou can play by clicking the little Pac Man icon on the bottom left corner of Google Maps once you’ve selected a city. Google warns that this game won’t be available for long, so play while you can.

You can move the map around a little before you click the Pac Man button if you want to play in a different part of Portland, but there needs to be a certain density of streets in order for the game to work, so you can’t drift too far outside the downtown.

Because of that minimum-street threshold, Maine’s largest city is the best place in the state for Google’s Pac Man feature, although you can get it to work in certain parts of other cities, like Lewiston and Bangor, as well.

Google has reportedly not yet released its reasoning for adding the Pac Man function to its maps.

The arcade classic was first released in 1980, making this year its 35th anniversary, but it wasn’t released in March and 35 years is sort of an arbitrary anniversary to celebrate.

Google celebrated the game’s 30th by changing its search page doodle into a playable board.

Some people are justifying the tech giant’s conversion of city streets into Pac Man games as an early April Fool’s gag, although posting it on March 31 would seem to be missing the mark.

In any case, in what I’ll call Portland Pac Man, you play by the same rules you always have — chomp around as Pac Man, gobbling up fruits for extra points and power pellets to turn your rival ghosts (who would otherwise kill you on contact) into edible ones.

Some trivia: The ghosts’ commonly known names are actually nicknames. The ghosts’ real names in the American game are Shadow (red), Speedy (pink), Bashful (cyan) and Pokey (orange).

In the original Japanese version, the ghosts’ names translated to Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle and Stupid.

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.