Clear the board without getting cornered
Arrows or WASD. The four chasers do not take breaks. The big pellets in the corners make them run.
The corners are the whole strategy
Four fat pellets, one in each corner. Eat one and the chasers turn blue and run from you for about six seconds, and that’s your window to clear a section you’ve been avoiding. Waste them early and the last quarter of the board becomes a nightmare.
Good players save at least two until the pellet count is under thirty. That’s when the maze is mostly empty and there’s nowhere to break line of sight.
They don’t all chase the same way
One of them goes straight for you every time. One aims at where you’re heading rather than where you are, which is why you keep running into it after a clean turn. The other two wander with a bias toward your half of the board. It looks random. It isn’t.
Learn the difference and the game changes. The direct one you can outrun. The one that predicts you has to be baited into committing before you cut back.
Cornering costs you
Every turn bleeds a fraction of speed while you realign to the grid. On a long straight you’re faster than anything behind you. In a tight cluster of turns you’re not. That’s the whole reason the outer ring is safer than the middle.
Why people search for this
Google put a fully playable maze on the homepage for the game’s thirtieth anniversary and left it up permanently after the reaction. It’s the single most-played thing they ever hid, and it’s still the first thing people mean when they say google pac-man. Estimated productivity lost that week ran into the millions of hours, which sounds made up and probably isn’t far off.
Other things with a score counter
Google snake is the closest relative and punishes greed the same way. Google space invaders and google block breaker cover the shooting and paddle ends of the arcade. The dinosaur game needs one button and beats all of them for time wasted.
Non-game stuff is on google easter eggs.
