The One April Fools Worth Playing

For a few years Google ran the best April Fools gag in tech—the one Silicon Valley company that used the occasion to build something genuinely fun rather than to announce a fake product indistinguishable from their real ones. The year before it was Pokémon scattered across Google Maps, catchable anywhere on Earth. In 2015 it was Pac-Man: the map turned into a maze, real city streets as corridors, the yellow circle eating his way through whatever neighborhood you happened to be looking at.

Berlin worked particularly well for it. The irregular grid of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain made for mazes with actual character—real corners, dead ends, the occasional long straight shot through what’s actually a dense residential block. Tokyo was almost too logical. Berlin’s navigable chaos was the right texture for the ghosts to get confused in.

I’ve maintained a long-running bit about having no idea who or what Pac-Man is, which I’ll sustain here out of principle. The game appears to involve a yellow circular creature eating things and avoiding other things. Which is, as life philosophies go, not the worst one you could inherit from a 1980 arcade cabinet.